Call for Papers /// Architecture & National Identity, 21–22 March 2026, Washington, DC, USA
- s-architecture
- Oct 7
- 2 min read
Architecture & National Identity
Fifteenth Biennial Symposium
School of Architecture, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, USA
21–22 March 2026
Keynote Speaker: Lawrence Vale, Ford Professor of Urban Design & Planning at MIT
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
As Sibel Bozdoğan attests in her award-winning book Modernism and Nation Building (2001), historic efforts by nation-states to achieve “identity construction through architecture” have touched many different building styles, materials, and processes (p50). Indeed, governments have used architecture to lay claims to the past, project imagined futures, and make self-conscious displays of historical rupture, revolution, and repair. Architecture and national identity are old dancing partners that can seem like natural allies, depending upon one another—and then, in the next moment, they can appear locked in a state of mutual exploitation. How do architects engage in the design of nations? How do leaders, governments, and other institutions of influence call upon buildings to help cohere a people? How are alternative and/or counter-identities of national minorities—the marginalized and/or the underground—architecturally composed and asserted?
Other Possible Questions:
How does the local shape the federal, and vice versa, in architecture?Why do we often see buildings on money, postage stamps, seals, and other state paraphernalia?What role does landscape design play in national identities?What is a capital city? Why do capitals move?What happens when aesthetics become a political force? For example, how has architectural beauty been asserted as a socio-political good? Can it be weaponized in periods of civic strife?As national power dynamics shift and evolve, how have problematic architectural forms, styles, or sites been purged, ellided, or rehabilitated?Can the building histories of violent regimes be cleansed through adaptation and reimagining?
The Latrobe Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians welcomes paper proposals engaging with past entanglements of national identity and buildings, landscapes, and urban form. They may focus on any country or period. We invite academics, students, independent scholars, designers, and other practitioners, from anywhere in the world, to submit. With the phrase Latrobe 2026 Abstract Submission in the subject line, please email a 300-word abstract and a 2-page CV to the following people by October 12, 2025:
Jacqueline Taylor: jst2z@virginia.edu
Nathaniel Robert Walker: walkernr@cua.edu
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