Newly constructed embassies simultaneously convey prestige and establish a national identity. Their primary aim—to represent a state in a foreign country and reflect its societal self-image—turns them into political symbols. Over the past 150 years, Germany has consistently sought to express itself through the distinct architecture of its government buildings in other countries. In particular, the new diplomatic buildings constructed during the forty-year division between the GDR and FRG document the close relationship between political, cultural, and personal choices and their contexts. From their extraterritorial positions, the buildings offer an expanded view of history and self-conception. To this day, they continue to shape representative architecture abroad.

The structural manifestations of digital data usually remain shrouded in secrecy. Katharina J. Neubauer has visited all of Google and Facebook’s data centers in Europe, and here presents an architectural and spatial discussion of these buildings. Directly confronting the structures draws our attention to their existence, their size and—simultaneously—their inconspicuousness. They are buildings of enormous societal importance that are not intended to be viewed or understood; yet the author has done so here, and recorded them through photographs and drawings.

New Belgrade represented a material and social experiment for a new society in post-war Yugoslavia. As the city and the country were being simultaneously built, the philosophy of praxis was developing in both the Yugoslavian and the international scene. Praxis of Collective Building deals with the interactions between this school of thought and the histories of architectural construction sites. By closely studying the microhistories of construction, the author considers the theoretical problems of collective production through different narratives: voluntary youth actions in the construction of New Belgrade through the lens of Marxian praxis, participative prefabrication as a way of addressing housing shortages in Yugoslavia, and the transfer and adaptation of the Yugoslavian prefabricated system to the Cuban context by the microbrigade movement.