Architecture and the Nation: Building an ‘Us’

Abstract

Look and see the constant flaggings of nationhood … Their unobtrusiveness arises, in part, from their very familiarity. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (1995), 174. Introduction The historian Bo Strath has argued that a central concern of European nation states in the nineteenth century ‘was to mobilise and monumentalise national and universal pasts in order to give legitimacy and meaning to the present and to outline the future culturally, politically, socially’ (2008: 26). Certainly states in this period were incredibly active in commissioning culture so as to embed their political projects and values into socially meaningful forms designed to help create/mobilize national publics. Illustrating something of the general argument of this book, architecture was central to the cultural self-understanding of nation states in this period, as it provided an opportunity for emerging states to give material form to their political power, while at the same representing one way in which the national community was presented as a continuous and ‘natural’ entity. In other words, architecture was a part of a broader historicist repertoire (that included flags, currency, anthems and art), which was mobilized to ‘invent’ national traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) in order to forge feelings of belonging. The attempt to use culture to sustain the nation as ‘natural’ and ‘continuous’ raises interesting sociological questions about the political construction and mobilization of culture; approaching this question from a constructivist perspective – and drawing particularly on the work of Benedict Anderson and Michael Billig – architecture can be framed as part of a broader repertoire of cultural symbols that states have long mobilized to construct and maintain national identities. Not only were major national buildings objects used to this end, they also housed many of the institutional rituals crucial to such invented traditions (Vale 1992: 54). The politicized search for national architectural styles best to reflect a state's aims and aspirations opened up a lucrative market for those newly professionalizing architects able to materialize ‘appropriate’ values in the built environment. Which architectural styles architects and states aligned themselves with was in many circumstances a highly contested question, with the social meanings attached to particular historicist styles and buildings taking on a ‘moral’ dimension.