The built environment of former socialist countries is often deemed uniform and drab, an apt reflection of a repressive regime. Building the State peeks behind the gray façade to reveal a colourful struggle over competing meanings of the nation, Europe, modernity and the past in a divided continent. The book shows how architecture was politically mobilized in the service of social change, first in socialist modernization and then in the postsocialist transition. The State has to be both materially produced and represented through the built environment; architecture thus offers a particularly interesting lens into the cultural aspects of State formation.