Architecture & National Identity

Fifteenth Biennial Symposium

Location: School of Architecture, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC
Dates: Saturday, March 21–Sunday, March 22, 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

Named after Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764–1820), America's first professional architect, the Latrobe Chapter is the metropolitan Washington affiliate of the Society of Architectural Historians. Since its founding in 1967, the Latrobe Chapter has served as a forum for the local academic and professional community of architectural historians and architects interested in history. Membership is open to anyone interested in architecture and the built environment. www.latrobechaptersah.org

About the Biennial Symposium

Over the past two decades, the Latrobe Chapter has hosted over a dozen biennial symposia, typically with one day of paper sessions and day of related tours centered on a specific theme in the historic development of metropolitan Washington, DC. Past symposia have welcomed scholars from across the country to deliver papers on such diverse themes as John Joseph Earley, Mid-Century Modernism, and Wartime Washington.

For more information on prior symposium themes, click the link below: