Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction
- 1 Architecture, Power and Identities: Surveying the Field
- 2 The Public Discourse of Architecture: Socializing Identities
- 3 Architecture and the Nation: Building an ‘Us’
- 4 Modernity and Mega-Events: Architecturing a Future
- 5 Architecture and Commemoration: The Construction of Memorialization
- 6 Iconic Architecture and Regeneration: The Form is the Function
- 7 ‘European’ Architecture: Politics in Search of Form and Meaning
- 8 Conclusion: Sociology, Architecture and the Politics of Building
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Modernity and Mega-Events: Architecturing a Future
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction
- 1 Architecture, Power and Identities: Surveying the Field
- 2 The Public Discourse of Architecture: Socializing Identities
- 3 Architecture and the Nation: Building an ‘Us’
- 4 Modernity and Mega-Events: Architecturing a Future
- 5 Architecture and Commemoration: The Construction of Memorialization
- 6 Iconic Architecture and Regeneration: The Form is the Function
- 7 ‘European’ Architecture: Politics in Search of Form and Meaning
- 8 Conclusion: Sociology, Architecture and the Politics of Building
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is right in the conduct of the nation's affairs every so often for nations to make a great statement of confidence, of great commitment to their own pride in the past and their optimism for the future.
Michael Heseltine, then Conservative MP responsible for the inception of the Millennium Dome project, in evidence to the Culture, Media & Sport Committee, 13 November 1997.Introduction
States have long sought to embed their political-economic projects within socially meaningful forms, with the architectural field being mobilized to this end in a wide variety of socio-political contexts. As was discussed in the previous chapter, the desire to forge a sense of coherent national community with its roots in antiquity saw historical motifs and discourses as key frames for major British state-led architectural projects in the nineteenth century. But, quite aside from the mobilization of historicist architecture to stress lineage in this way, the latter half of the twentieth century saw nation states' repertoires of architectural representation characterized by the dominance of rationalist, future-oriented and technologically driven modernist forms. Seeking to benefit from the ostensibly progressive promises implied by modern architecture's broader social programme and aesthetic, many states in the post-Second World War period sought to use architecture to signify a self-conscious rupture with the immediate past. In short, the promise of modernist architecture, unencumbered by tradition, was to play a central role in symbolic and material social reconstruction of societies.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Sociology of ArchitectureConstructing Identities, pp. 67 - 91Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011