Bringing together case studies from Europe, North and South America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia, this book provides an exploration of the relationship between architecture and nationalism. It includes essays grouped together in three thematic sections: Revisiting Nationalism, Interpreting Nationalism and Questioning Nationalism.
Unlike regionalism in architecture, which has been widely discussed in recent years, nationalism in architecture has not been so well explored and understood. However, the most powerful collective representation of a nation is through its architecture and how that architecture engages the global arena by expressing, defining and sometimes negating a sense of nation in order to participate in the international world. Bringing together case studies from Europe, North and South America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia, this book provides a truly global exploration of the relationship between architecture and nationalism, via the themes of regionalism and representation, various national building projects, ethnic and trans-national expression, national identities and histories of nationalist architecture and the philosophies and sociological studies of nationalism. It argues that nationalism needs to be trans-national as a notion to be critically understood and the geographical scope of the proposed volume reflects the continuing relevance of the topic within current architectural scholarship as an overarching notion. The interdisciplinary essays are coherently grouped together in three thematic sections: Revisiting Nationalism, Interpreting Nationalism and Questioning Nationalism. These chapters, offer vignettes of the protean appearances of nationalism across nations, and offer a basis of developing wider knowledge and critically situated understanding of the question, beyond a singular nation's limited bounds.
The role of the home, the domestic sphere and the intimate, ethno-cultural identities that are cultivated within it, are critical to understanding the polemical constructions of country and city; tradition and modernity; and regionalism and cosmopolitanism. The home is fundamental to ideas of the homeland that give nationalism its imaginative form and its political trajectory. This book explores positions that are vital to ideas of national belonging through the history of colonial, bourgeois self-fashioning and post colonial identity construction in Sri Lanka. The country remains central to related architectural discourses due to its emergence as a critical site for regional architecture, post-independence. Suggesting patterns of indigenous accommodation and resistance that are expressed through built form, the book argues that the nation grows as an extension of an indigenous private sphere, ostensibly uncontaminated by colonial influences, domesticating institutions and appropriating rural geographies in the pursuit of its hegemonic ideals. This ambitious, comprehensive, wide-ranging book presents an abundance of new and original material and many imaginative insights into the history of architecture and nationalism from the mid nineteenth century to the present day.
This book is the first comprehensive investigation of the architecture of the apartheid state in the period of rapid economic growth and political repression from 1957 to 1966 when buildings took on an ideological role that was never remote from the increasingly dominant administrative, legislative and policing mechanisms of the regime. It considers how this process reflected the usurpation of a regional modernism and looks to contribute to wider discourses on international postwar modernism in architecture. Buildings in Pretoria that came to embody ambitions of the apartheid state for industrialisation and progress serve as case studies. These were widely acclaimed projects that embodied for apartheid officials the pursuit of modernisation but carried latent apprehensions of Afrikaners about their growing economic prospects and cultural estrangement in Africa. It is a less known and marginal story due to the dearth of material and documents buried in archives and untranslated documents. Many of the documents, drawings and photographs in the book are unpublished and include classified material and photographs from the National Nuclear Research Centre, negatives of 1960s from Pretoria News and documents and pamphlets from Afrikaner Broederbond archives. State architecture became the most iconic public manifestation of an evolving expression of white cultural identity as a new generation of architects in Pretoria took up the challenge of finding form to their prospects and beliefs. It was an opportunistic faith in Afrikaners who urgently needed to entrench their vulnerable and contested position on the African continent. The shift from provincial town to apartheid capital was swift and relentless. Little was left to stand in the way of the ambitions and aim of the state as people were uprooted and forcibly relocated, structures torn down and block upon block of administration towers and slabs erected across Pretoria. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of architectural history as well as those with an interest in postcolonial studies, political science and social anthropology.
A common thread throughout the essays in this volume is a focus on new loci of power that emerge either in collision with colonial power structures, or in collaboration with or those that emerge in the wake of decolonization. While the authors recognize the presence of a larger structure of colonial hegemony, they also investigate those centers of power that emerge in the interstices of crevices of colonial power. Interdisciplinary and theoretically innovative, this book offers a global perspective on colonial and national landscapes, rewrites the master creator narrative, examines national landscapes as sites of contestation and views the globalization of processes such as archaeology beyond the boundaries of the national.
This book investigates architectural and urban dimensions of the ethnic-nationalist conflict in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, during and after the siege of 1992–1995. Focusing on the wartime destruction of a portion of the cityscape in central Sarajevo and its post-war reconstruction, re-inscription and memorialization, the book reveals how such spatial transformations become complicit in the struggle for reconfiguration of the city’s territory, boundaries and place identity. Drawing on original research, the study highlights the capacities of architecture and urban space to mediate terror, violence and resistance, and to deal with heritage of the war and act a catalyst for ethnic segregation or reconciliation. Based on a multi-disciplinary methodological approach grounded in architectural and urban theory, the spatial turn in critical social theory and assemblage thinking, as well as techniques of spatial analysis, in particular morphological mapping, the book provides an innovative spatial framework for analyzing the political role of contemporary cities.
The first edition of Architecture, Power, and National Identity, published in 1992, has become a classic, winning the prestigious Spiro Kostof award for the best book in architecture and urbanism. Lawrence Vale fully has fully updated the book, which focuses on the relationship between the design of national capitals across the world and the formation of national identity in modernity. Tied to this, it explains the role that architecture and planning play in the forceful assertion of state power. The book is truly international in scope, looking at capital cities in the United States, India, Brazil, Sri Lanka, Kuwait, Bangladesh, and Papua New Guinea.
This book explores how Malaysia, as a multicultural modern nation, has approached issues of nationalism and regionalism in terms of physical expression of the built environment. Ever since the nation’s post-Colonial era, architects and policy makers have grappled with the theoretical and practical outcomes of creating public architecture that effectively responds to traditions, nationhood and modernity. The authors compile and analyse prevailing ideas and strategies, present case studies in architectural language and form, and introduce the reader to tensions arising between a nationalist agenda and local ‘regionalist’ architectural language. These dichotomies represent the very nature of multicultural societies and issues with identity; a challenge that various nations across the globe face in a changing environment. This topical and pertinent volume will appeal to students and scholars of urban planning, architecture and the modern city.
Sport and architecture are two elements of contemporary life that have a broad and profound impact on the world around us. The role architecture plays in shaping buildings and societies has occupied historians for centuries. Likewise, the cultural, economic, and political importance of sport is the subject of sustained academic inquiry. When sport and architecture converge, as in the 2012 London Olympics or the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, then the impact of these two forms of social activity is redoubled. This book presents a new and dynamic study of the complex relationship between sport and architecture. It explores the history of sport architecture and examines the buildings and events that create sites where sport and architecture converge in particularly telling ways. Its chapters discuss the following topics: sport architecture and urban redevelopment sport architecture and technology sport architecture and nationalism sport architecture as social activism sport architecture and global capitalism. By considering the importance of architectural form alongside these key themes, this book represents a landmark study for anybody interested in the social and cultural significance of architecture or sport.
In the nineteenth-century paradigm of architectural organicism, the notion that buildings possessed character provided architects with a lens for relating the buildings they designed to the populations they served. Advances in scientific race theory enabled designers to think of “race” and “style” as manifestations of natural law: just as biological processes seemed to inherently regulate the racial characters that made humans a perfect fit for their geographical contexts, architectural characters became a rational product of design. Parallels between racial and architectural characters provided a rationalist model of design that fashioned some of the most influential national building styles of the past, from the pioneering concepts of French structural rationalism and German tectonic theory to the nationalist associations of the Chicago Style, the Prairie Style, and the International Style. In Building Character, Charles Davis traces the racial charge of the architectural writings of five modern theorists—Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William Lescaze—to highlight the social, political, and historical significance of the spatial, structural, and ornamental elements of modern architectural styles.
