Although largely marginal in official accounts of modern architecture, during the
second half of the twentieth century the development of large concrete panel systems was central to debates about architecture's modernisation and industrialisation.
Distributed across cultural, geographical and political contexts, these systems
produced more than 170 million apartments worldwide. This book focuses on a
particular aspect of this history - systems exported from Soviet Russia into Cuba and then on to Chile in the 1960s and 1970s. Written from the point of view of the worker as much as the architect, and containing an incredible visual panoply of archival photographs, stills, cartoons, sketches and drawings, as well as oral histories from its surviving protagonists, the book offers a portrait of an architectural and political history whose constant symbolic and physical register is a concrete panel..