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

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?

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

Abstracts due October 12, 2025! For full symposium and submission information, visit our Current Symposium page.