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.