On 4 April 1945, the Soviet Red Army began its final assault on Vienna. Five days later, after sporadic—at times fierce—fighting, Soviet troops penetrated the inner city. The battle lasted for several more days in the suburbs, until the withdrawal of the last remnants of the German forces. The Red Army saw some seventeen thousand soldiers killed in action. In the first days and weeks after the battle ended, Soviet troops committed systematic sexual violence against women and girls across the city. The Allied occupation of Austria formally commenced on 27 April 1945.Allied bombing and street-to-street fighting during the siege left large areas of Vienna in ruin. Many of Austria's other cities and much of the nation's transportation infrastructure were also partially or extensively destroyed. The occupation, however, created problems for the postwar Austrian authorities that were far more daunting than the mere need for rebuilding. Like neighboring Germany, the country was divided into four zones, each administered by one of the four victorious powers: the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, and France. Vienna, like Berlin, was similarly divided. But the occupation zones did not partition the city as neatly as was the case in Berlin. The twenty-two urban districts were carved into seven sectors: two British (which were not contiguous), two Soviet (also not contiguous), one French, one American, and an “international sector” in the inner city.1 Given Vienna's siting in the eastern end of Austria, in the Soviet zone, the city's outlying suburbs also came under Soviet occupation. This situation, with its attendant problems and complications, lasted for a full decade, until the signing in July 1955 of the Staatsvertrag, the Austrian State Treaty, which returned Austria once more to full sovereignty.Monika Platzer, curator and head of collections at the Architekturzentrum Wien, has written a thorough and compelling account of this ten-year-long chapter in Austria's history, a period mostly disregarded by recent architectural historians. The reasons are not difficult to identify: for decades, historians of Austrian architecture, design, and urbanism saw little value in recounting a painful moment, when the country as a whole—and the architectural profession along with it—struggled to emerge from the depths of defeat, destruction, and occupation. Moreover, for many years the mostly unspoken consensus among architectural historians was that most of what was built in Austria during this period was of little or no consequence.When the war ended in April 1945, many of the leading Austrian modernist architects were dead or in exile. Adolf Loos, the most important of the interwar modernists, died in 1933. Josef Frank, Ernst A. Plischke, Clemens Holzmeister, Ernst Lichtblau, Felix Augenfeld, Walter Sobotka, Walter Loos (no relation to Adolf), and Heinrich Kulka—to name only some of the most prominent—all fled the country; only Plischke and Holzmeister would return. Prominent architects such as Richard Neutra, R. M. Schindler, and Bernard Rudofsky, who had emigrated earlier, had no intention of going back. Josef Hoffmann, the grand old man of Austria's already long engagement with modernism, still lived in Vienna, but he was aged, worn, and tainted by his earlier associations with the Nazis. Most of the architects who emerged in the later 1940s and 1950s, like Roland Rainer and Karl Schwanzer, were just beginning their careers. It would take another decade, until the mid-1960s, for Austrians to return to the front ranks of the international architectural avant-garde.With Cold War and Architecture, which served as the companion book for an exhibition of the same name, held at the Architekturzentrum Wien from October 2019 through February 2020, Platzer sets out not to examine postwar Austria's architectural internal workings per se but to explore how the four occupying powers sought to influence Austrian architectural and design discourse—all in a larger effort to reshape the country to conform to their own political and cultural aspirations. The main body of the book is divided into four sections, one for each of the occupying powers, detailing how each pursued its individual agenda. Much of what Platzer has excavated is new, a long-hidden story of propaganda attempts, disinformation, and behind-the-scenes manipulation.The whole episode, as Platzer meticulously documents, took place against the unfolding backdrop of the Cold War. Austria was not merely a sideshow of that story—rather it was ground zero, where the divisions between what would become the NATO and Warsaw Pact blocs would play out, and where the struggle to assert political and cultural dominance seized center stage. The weapons in this war were not tanks and guns but propaganda, with each of the competing powers seeking to demonstrate the rightness and appeal of its own vision of modern life and polity.The British, badly weakened by the war, used gentle persuasion and a “Projection of Britain” to assert their influence (43). By March 1946, they had already delivered five and a half tons of books to Austria in an effort toward “reeducation.” Their primary aim when it came to the rebuilding of the country was to influence city planning, especially through the advancement of an updated version of the garden city idea. Der Aufbau, the leading postwar Austrian architectural journal, paid particular attention to British planning principles, describing the varied efforts to build new communities on Vienna's periphery.The French, too, sought to employ cultural policies to assert their influence. Part of their strategy was to reinforce the notion that Austria was not Germany, that its architectural traditions were very different, and that it had to shape its own future. It was a message to which many Austrian architects—both old and young—were highly receptive, and it set Austria on a new course toward architectural independence. France's attempt to advance Le Corbusier as the paragon of a new architectural order and urbanism was more controversial, and the response in Austria was mixed. One national newspaper, Die Wochen-Presse, encapsulated the problem in a headline, asking whether Le Corbusier was “Pope or Anti-Christ?”The Americans and the Soviets, predictably, made the most far-reaching efforts to influence the development and direction of postwar Austria. Through the Marshall Plan, the United States sought to promote the “Westernization” of Austria, not only helping the country to rebuild but also doing so in ways that stressed democratization and greater social equality. In 1952–53, the U.S. government sponsored an exhibition on the Veitingergasse (adjacent to the site of the 1932 Vienna Werkbundsiedlung) featuring “advanced, all-modular, all-component houses” (129). Although most of the designs were genuinely thoughtful, the houses were better suited to the American context and had little, if any, impact in Austria. Nonetheless, several Viennese architects, among them Walter Jaksch and Carl Appel, did subscribe to American forms and building methods. In the early 1960s, Jaksch and Appel, working with the Chicago firm of Holabird & Root, would construct perhaps the most “American” building in Vienna in this period, the Hotel Intercontinental, at one end of the Stadtpark.The Soviet strategy materialized almost immediately following the Red Army's capture of Vienna, through efforts to restore public life and revive cultural venues such as cabarets, cinemas, concert halls, and theaters. But the Soviets were slow to open information centers, preferring instead to influence cultural policy through their agents and sympathizers. Two of the leading figures in postwar Austrian cultural affairs, Viktor Matejka and Ernst Fischer, were communists, and the Soviets sought to use them, to the extent it was possible, to direct policy “from within.” They also sponsored sympathetic architects’ “educational” trips to the Soviet Union. In the end, despite various large and impressive exhibitions and considerable effort, “the Soviets’ hopes to spark Austria to change course towards becoming a people's democracy were not fulfilled” (217). The Austrian Communist Party never emerged in this time as a leading political contender, rarely garnering more than 5 percent of the popular vote.Platzer appends to her account a fitting denouement in which she examines the activities of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne in Austria from 1947 to 1959. Many of the most important postwar Austrian architects were members of CIAM, including Carl Auböck, Erich Boltenstern, Oswald Haerdtl, Wilhelm Holzbauer, Friedrich Kurrent, Roland Rainer, Karl Schwanzer, and Johannes Spalt. Through their work, the Austrian chapter of CIAM became perhaps the most important catalyst for architectural renewal, sponsoring exhibitions, symposia, and competitions. The activities of CIAM and the ten-year-long occupation also had the effect of forcing Austria's architects to take stock of what was happening abroad, and to come to terms with it—a marked change from the interwar years, when Austria's leading architects had mostly looked inward.The deep irony of this Cold War tale is that the efforts of the Austrians themselves ultimately outweighed the cultural propaganda exercises of the four occupying powers. To a large extent, Austria regained its status in the global architectural community by subverting and working around what the foreign interests sought to do. CIAM Austria brought together what remained of the interwar avant-garde and attracted a new generation of architects eager to reframe the country's building traditions and move beyond the political and cultural heavy-handedness of the preceding postwar years.This is a well-written and thoroughly researched book. It will undoubtedly constitute a landmark of European postwar architectural literature. The underlying lesson here, however, is perhaps as much historiographical as it is based in content. Platzer is able to weave together a gripping and meaningful narrative precisely because she is willing to look where others have not, to cast her net broadly and deeply, examining the entire political and cultural nexus of the time. In doing so, she reveals a splendid instance of how larger historical forces—often well outside the standard architectural discourse—can have a decisive role in shaping the built environment.