# short_name
Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe

# name
Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | Public Interface | Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | Architecture : Introductory survey essay

# description
Sight and sound Architecture Europe (general) Medieval Court at the 1851 Great Exhibition (1851) Hungarian Parliament building - Országház [Budapest (HU) 1904] Aleksandr Nevskij Cathedral [Sofia (BG) 1912] National Museum of Finland [Helsinki (FI) 1916] Schloss Stolzenfels [Koblenz (DE) 1842] Ground plan of the national pavilions 1900 Paris (FR) Exposition universelle Norwegian pavilion, Paris Universal Exhibition Finnish Pavilion, Paris Universal Exhibition 1889 Paris (FR) Exposition universelle Pavilions of Bosnia-Hercegovina and Hungary at the Paris Universal Exhibition 1900 Paris (FR) Exposition universelle Popescu, Carmen

In 1906, lecturing in front of the Seventh International Congress of Architects held in London, Sir Bannister Fletcher stated that “The building art reflects the history of each period, and is an index of the social and political condition of the people and of those great religious and historical events which are landmarks in the history of mankind. Architecture then may be said to be the result of and inseparable from history”. On this occasion, he presented a “Tree of Architecture” that grew branches of “historical” and “non-historical” styles, nurtured by what he thought to be fundamental human concepts: on the left side the preconditions – Geography, Geology and Climate; on the right side, its achievements – Religion, Social and History.

Fletcher’s vision synthesized metaphorically a whole system of architectural thought as it had developed in the preceding century. Two principles ruled this vision: the historicity of architecture, its different chronological periods seen as a steady progression, and its national character, each style being associated to a certain people, from the ancient Assyrians and Egyptians to the modern Americans. Ruskin had described these principles, a good half-century previously, as being dialectically linked: architecture “connects forgotten and following ages with each other, and half constitutes the identity, as it concentrates the sympathy, of nations”.

The idea that architecture bore a meaning and had a powerful force of representation was not new; the novelty in 19th-century architectural thought was its emphasis on national relatedness, as both the product of and the instrument for (literally) identity-building. While geography, with its fixities of soil and climate, was undoubtedly fundamental for shaping architecture (and identity), history, as the metaphorical soil of the nation, became an equally important foundation: the sediments of history, defying the ages, encapsulated (collective) memory. The historicity of architectural thinking was thus turned into a paradigm not only for studying existing buildings, but also for creating architecture for the future.

With the expansion beyond the sole model of antiquity – whose concrete rootedness in space and time was somehow transcended by its idealized stature –, architectural contexts from specific periods and places came into view. When Seroux d’Agincourt started his tour of Europe in 1777, his intention was to trace the broken thread of tradition, as he called it, abandoned by Winckelmann at the end of classical antiquity. He wanted to demonstrate that this thread was never broken, and searched for it “among the most amorphous productions and the less important and most fragile monuments”. In his Histoire de l’art par les monuments depuis sa décadence au IVe siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement au XVIe, the French erudite not only attempted to establish a continuous (and long) chronology of the history of art, but also broadened its field by including new styles and territories, such as northern European Gothic or the Moresque of Spain. Since some of these variants were, to a certain extent, “national” (i.e. country-specific), writing art history was to become a national enterprise as well – hence Seroux hoped that Enlightenment-Patriotic “love of the fatherland” would motivate historians from different countries to continue and deepen his study.

The study of the history of architecture developed throughout the 19th century as a discipline founded on this national footing. The taxonomic structure, which was progressively elaborated, overlaid Romantic, Hegelian historicism with the complex ramifications of a phylogenetic evolutionist system. While the different ages of architecture were established, within this chronology the several examples were studied (and classified) against a national background. If art, according to the Hegelian vision that had deeply influenced the writing of art history, was the product of “peculiar national genius”, architecture – the “greatest expression of all art history if not all history in general”, as Hegel’s disciple Karl Schnaase put it –, appeared even more so. Its 19th-century historiography largely defended this position, from Huyot’s and Lebas’ (and briefly Viollet-le-Duc’s) teachings at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, to Schnaase’s, Kugler’s and Lübke’s monumental histories of architecture. The reason lay in the twofold nature of architecture, both reflecting the local conditions (materials and climate) and making history visible.

As architecture managed to encapsulate history, architects developed the ambition to represent it: “better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning”, wrote Ruskin, for whom an edifice “chased with bas-reliefs of our […] battles” was better than “a thousand histories”. Against its national-taxonomic background, the new architecture ought to be a readable object – a demand that had to be fulfilled in terms of structure as well as of narrative, two major guidelines (though for different reasons) for 19th-century architects. The assimilation of an edifice to a book became a current metaphor at that time, from Goethe’s celebration of the Strasbourg cathedral (1772) to Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), and transposed into a modern vision by Labrouste’s Sainte-Geneviève Library (1843-75).

This meaningfulness was given different interpretations and served different causes, like Gothic architecture, “discovered” at the end of the 18th century and cultivated during the following century into the premier example of symbolic architecture. Schinkel saw in it the perfect emblem of “Germanness” (also in its ideal nationwide unity) and consequently adopted a Gothic style for newly (re-)constructed Rhine castles, the 1813 Bavarian Walhalla competition (eventually won by a Greek revival scheme) and the commemorative cathedral for the Wars of Liberation (1814). For Pugin, who praised primarily its Christian virtues, a return to the Gothic would not only have bolstered that Englishness which he saw threatened by various architectural imports, but would have reasserted moral truth. More than a fashionable enterprise, Gothic revival constituted the means for healing the social woes of industrialization. For those architects involved in restoration work, a craft which burgeoned as the direct result of romantic historicism, Gothic was valuable for both its aesthetic and structural qualities and represented the Golden Age of architecture, to be used as a model for future generations.

The current historiography of architecture often employs the term “National Romanticism”, borrowed from cultural history, in order to distinguish within this large span of meanings those architectural languages which were particularly relevant for a national agenda. It is used in particular to designate an Art Nouveau variant that spread from Finland to the Scandinavian and Baltic countries (“Nordic National Romanticism”) around 1900. However, the term appears both too vague (in that it elides the ideological dimension) and overly fixated on the Romantic period (which represented only an episode in the history of this movement). Rather, the tight connection between architecture and a perceived “national character” expresses an identity quest, be it national, regional or local. Hence what matters is the symbolic configuration, both ideological and aesthetic, of this major 19th-century preoccupation, which lastingly influenced the vision of architecture as identity-carrier.

World Fairs played a crucial role in shaping not only manufacture and design, but also architecture as an identity-carrier, and in providing it with the appropriate methods for expressing this new role. While picturesque motifs proliferated in the design of the various national pavilions, the displays of the participant nations were meant to demonstrate both historical progress and national peculiarities in the arts and in particular in architecture, with the various pavilions representing different architectural periods and traditions. The trend established itself at the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris, where the participating countries presented, alongside their stands in the collective structures, individual installations in form of peasant houses, palaces or religious buildings. For the 1889 exhibition, Charles Garnier prepared a “history of the human dwelling”, thus translating into a three-dimensional experiment the architectural theories of the moment. Such tableaux vivants (some of the “primitive” huts and peasant houses were inhabited in order to simulate “real life”) offered both an eloquent survey of architectural history and an ethnographic explanation of the world. The display of La Rue des Nations, presented for the first time at the 1878 Universal Exhibition in Paris, with its various ethnic “villages”, strengthened the notion that each nation or ethnicity is defined by its salient peculiarities. Meanwhile, a certain confusion was created between the ideological meaning of these particularisms and the aesthetic purport of the motifs exemplifying them. Picturesque local colour became a value in its own right; thus, at a time when the Romanian intelligentsia strove to affirm the fledgeling state’s national identity, recently liberated from Ottoman domination, Prince George Bibescu bought the Norwegian pavilion presented on the Rue des Nations at the 1878 Universal exhibition, and installed it in Courbevoie as part of his summer residence there. At the next exhibition, in 1889, the same Bibescu invited, in his capacity of general commissioner, the pioneering architect of the “national style” to design the Romanian restaurant as a peasant house.

World fairs helped to spread the idea that architecture is the most emblematic image of a nation’s identity, while at the same time shaping and developing a vocabulary and systematics for “national styles”. Various emerging nations, whose independence was recently obtained or still subject to conflict, had their pavilions designed by foreign architects; this occurred, for instance, with the Balkan installations for many successive World Fairs. Creating the architectural identity of those countries marshalled state-of-the-art architectural history and theory and drew on designers educated in the leading western European centres; this, as well as the fact that upcoming generations of architects from these emerging nations were sent to those selfsame centres for their training, led to a convergence of approaches. This was all the more noticeable when pavilions of different countries were designed by one and the same architect. Ambroise-Alfred Baudry designed the 1867 Romanian pavilion and the 1889 and 1900 Algerian palaces.

At the same time, World Fairs stimulated the development of a historiographical canon concerning national cultures. They stimulated artistic, architectural and ethnographic research which in turn produced many collections that were later to form the nucleus of important national museums. The Universal Exhibition of Vienna, 1873, marked the start of folklore research and collecting in Hungary and Bohemia. Adopting the format and purpose of international manifestations, local exhibitions contributed to this development. The Polytechnic Exhibition (Moscow 1872), the Pan-Russian Arts and Industry Exhibition (Moscow 1880), the Czecho-Slav Ethnographic Exhibition (Prague 1895), the Millennial Exhibition of Budapest (1896), and the General National Exhibition (Bucharest 1906) all joined the quest for a nation-specific architectural language, while at the same time turning national art into a powerful instrument with long-lasting cultural and political effects.

In addition, pavilions could serve as models either for future installations in other exhibitions or for designs in different places. The encounter with contemporary American architecture showcased at the World’s Columbian Exposition had an unmistakable impact on young Scandinavian architects seeking for a national style.

Which factor predominated in defining the nation’s character: its history or its folklore? Was the nation exemplified in certain historical periods or in geographical regions, or should the two be dovetailed? Long-standing states or empires tended to favour this last option. The Ottoman Empire presented itself at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 with an “Ottoman village” that included specimens from different regions.

Sources and repertoires were much debated among architects, also outside the exhibition context. Much as in the case of music, painting and literature, this involved a crucial point in the very definition of national character: was a nation to be defined by its geographical rootedness, with its landscapes, natural resources and climate, or by its historical narratives and experiences? And in either case, what was the most appropriate manner to express it? Since Vitruvius, the idea of a locale-rooted architecture had been firmly established; however, from the early 19th century, history appeared to offer an additional dimension of rootedness. In his Scottish Baronial Architecture (1891), Charles Rennie Mackintosh, one of the foremost representatives of the Modern style at the end of this historicist century, remarked that “the character of a style does not depend upon the mere material from which it was fabricated, but upon the sentiments and conditions under which it has been developed”.

Vernacular and historicist inspiration competed in creating a national-specific architecture, and the choice between them was anything but clear-cut. Even so, the vernacular emphasis tended to outweigh the historicist option as the century progressed, in line with the developing conceptualization of nations and national identities and the geopolitical trend to conceive countries and regions in terms of centres and peripheries.

In the case of Gothicism, for instance, its motifs and designs constituted the core of a German-national revival in the early decades of the century. But historians and architectural historians gradually brought into view earlier periods, such as Romanesque or Lombard architecture. Due to its connection with the Ostrogoths (also celebrated by historians and authors like Massmann and Dahn), the Lombard style came to embody the true, primary source of the Germanic monumental tradition – as per Lübke’s history of architecture, whose influence was paramount from the 1860s onwards. Thus, the highly symbolic Völkerschlachtdenkmal (Monument to the Battle of Leipzig, 1898-1913) echoed the mausoleum built in Ravenna for Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths. That famous tomb also stimulated the imaginary of Scandinavian architects, whose idealization of Nordicness pushed them into a historicist quest for archaic Germanic roots. This primitivism reached back to ancient epics (the Kalevala, for instance, was extensively exploited in Finnish art and architecture) as guarantee and bedrock for the “authenticity” of a national expression. The recourse to a primeval history reflecting the eternally enduring features of the nation was to become symptomatic for the nationalisms of the 1930s, which often manipulated historicity to its extremes; but its use is already present in to the first phases of the national styles – like the Hungarian attachment to an (imaginary) remote-Oriental origin, as expressed by the Babylonian-looking pavilion for the 1911 Turin exhibition, by Emil Töry and Moric Pogany.

The recourse to religious architectural sources followed from a similar reasoning – the spirituality of religion reflecting the very soul of the nation. Religious edifices, considered the most historically important architectural accomplishments, became the premier source of inspiration for reviving both architectural and moral/social values. Pugin’s belief that the state of architecture and the state of society are inextricably linked was widely shared. Religious architecture was seen as the stylistic transcription of a particular civilization, expressed through its aesthetic and constructive qualities. Specific periods were associated with certain civilizations, not only in the narrow sense of national identity – a field where the religious repertoire was extensively exploited – but also in a large interpretation of “race families”. It mattered less, in such a context, if Gothic was French, German or English, since it expressed altogether the values of a Northern civilization in its assimilation of Western Christianity. By the same token, the hybrid Romanesque-Byzantine style came to denote Gothicism’s “Other”, in various inflections: in Marseille, Vaudoyer’s design for La Major Cathedral (1852-1983) signalled the city’s gateway position towards the South and the Orient; Theophil von Hansen employed it for the Greek Uniate Church in Vienna (1856-58), a scheme to be turned into a durable model for the very concept of Christian Orthodoxy within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Often “particularized” by a Moorish-Orientalist inflection, the Romanesque-Byzantine repertoire was adopted in the same period for synagogues, and came to be considered worldwide as the proper architecture for Jewish temples.

Associating cultural traditions with particular architectures often involved an intricately coded political agenda. For many successive World Fairs, the Christian countries in the Balkans were represented through pavilions designed (by Western architects) in the form of Byzantine churches. This choice could be read as reflecting the nations’ desire to bring their long Ottoman domination to an end, but also as a sign of non-Western alterity on the European map. While the Neo-Byzantine style symbolized specific national claims – differently declined and defended in the countries of the Balkan peninsula – it became meanwhile heavily instrumentalized by the Pan-Slavic movement. The Aleksandr Nevskij cathedrals designed by Russian architects in Tallinn (1894-1900, Mikhail Preobraženskij), Warsaw (1894-1912, Leontij Benois) and Sofia (1896-1912, Aleksander Pomerantsev), a symbol of Russophile Pan-Slavism, were directly inspired by the “Russo-Byzantine” or Russian revivalist style which Konstantin Thon (Benois’ predecessor at the Academy of St Petersburg) had used for the Church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow (1831-89) – an icon of Russian identity.

The symbolism of church architecture was so powerful that often a single design aimed to packed various references, motifs and allusions into a single building or building-cluster. The technique of “famous quotations” (typical of 19th-century lieux de mémoire, characterized by their tendency to load a single signifier with a maximum of cultural and historical significances) often created an eclectic style alongside a multiplicity of meanings.

However spiritual the architecture, its materiality remained a fact. Architects exploited this double nature in their quest for meaning: the National Museum in Helsinki (1904-10; Gesellius, Lindgren and Saarinen), was “national” not only through its form, reminiscent of a church, but also through its material, a rough-cut granite seen as a symbol of the Finnish soil. Materiality – the choice of materials, but also their very substance – obviously connected architecture directly to its site. This rootedness ranged from straightforward appropriateness to the environment to different degrees of contextual symbolism. “National styles” recurrently exploited contextualization in a Romantic (and generic) sense of “national character”. It was in regionalist architecture, with its several types, that we see the most eager identitarian use of this approach. An ideal of natural harmoniousness anchored architecture in its origins and locale and bolstered architectural regionalism – be this as a mode of picturesque couleur locale (e.g. the “Swiss chalet”, a national icon in Switzerland turned into a fashionable motif worldwide) or as a deliberate architectural adoption of folklore or the vernacular. In the age of state enlargement and incipient globalization, “critical regionalism” became a highly successful counter-strategy.

On the global map of “meaningful” architecture, centres and peripheries were distributed on the basis of different considerations. While peripheries were primarily seeking recognition (culture serving here as a political instrument), centres were relatively more involved in professional doctrine, classifying architecture with criteria of taxonomy and legibility. The former fed reflections in architectural historiography, while the latter gave rise to the revisionist approach of “stylistic appropriateness”, meaning that to each new type of building required by modern society belonged its own stylistic expression. A striking example is John Foulston’s remarkable design for Ker Street in Devonport (1820s), with a “primitive Doric” town hall, an “Egyptian” library, a “Hindoo” nonconformist chapel, etc.

It is interesting to note the various ways in which identity was represented in different architectural typologies, most of them created in the 19th century as a response to new social demands. Historicism was dominant in shaping the design of city-halls and museums, each emphasizing a particular aspect of the past, from the glorious deeds of the nation to a celebration of its cultural achievement. Geography offered a modality for railway stations, which were perceived as gateways to the nation’s territories: central stations in important cities were decorated with depictions of the successive stops of the line, while smaller edifices in the countryside used regionalist motifs so as to offer the traveller a synthetic encounter with the locality. The popular new genre of the railway poster used similar registers, presenting would-be tourists with a vision that both integrated and particularized the country spanned by the new network. A different type of geographic suggestion appeared frequently in the architecture of tourist resorts, which gave free rein to the picturesque: besides regional touches inspired by local-vernacular styles, many of the buildings displayed exotic schemes and ornaments, especially in seaside resorts. Such architecture practically de-localized these places of leisure, opening them up to new and imaginary horizons.

What was it that drove these identity quests? In his True principles of pointed or Christian architecture (1841), Pugin denounced senseless uniformity: “Such is, indeed, the extraordinary amalgamation of architecture, style and manners now in progress, that were it not for the works of nature which cannot be destroyed, and the glorious works of Christian antiquity which have not yet been destroyed, Europe would soon present such sameness as to cease to be interesting. […] England is rapidly losing its venerable garb; all places are becoming alike”. Pugin proposed that architects appeal to common sense (“what does an Italian house do in England? Is there any similarity between our climate and that of Italy? Another objection to Italian architecture is this, – we are not Italians, we are Englishmen”) and to patriotic loyalty, invoked as “an absolute duty” for every Englishman. Pugin’s argument combined a clearly ideological stance with a reaction to universalizing scale enlargements in the modern world: “we ought to view the habits and manners of other nations without prejudice, derive improvement from all we observe admirable, but we should never forget our land”.

This mild anti-cosmopolitan alienation was a far cry from the preoccupations of the architects (and ideologists) in the peripheries. Here, identity represented a vital positive force, since it involved the (marginalized) nation’s very existence. The evolutionist reading of humanity, as per Kant’s anthropology (pointing out that certain peoples had not yet achieved identity) and Hegel’s philosophy of history (opposing historically realized “nations fully conscious of what they were” to those “but half awakened”), intimately linked conscious identity to a state of cultural progress. Defining one’s national identity and consciously conceptualizing repertoires and practices became an enterprise of paramount importance for emerging nations in the peripheries – a trend which continued unabated in the 20th century.

Despite the transnational parallels in the identity-building process, a certain difference is noticeable between types and degrees of marginality in various peripheries. While the Scandinavian and the Balkan peninsulas were both peripheral to Europe’s continental heartland, they approached a national architecture differently, both chronologically and in their choices. There is a clear emphasis on the vernacular in the Nordic countries, whereas the Balkans, from the Ottoman Empire to the emerging nation-states, favoured historicist invocations of prestigious local art. History and folklore both featured in both macro-regions’ “national styles”, but they are used in different ways. In the Scandinavia the national gravitated to the realm of saga and myth, which furnished motifs to painters, decorative artists and architects alike, who favoured atemporal, epic shapes, as if going beyond time and searching for an immutable essence of the nation. Hence also the rise of a “plain vernacular” (eschewing more picturesque folklorism). This subtle process of abstraction from the specifics of time and space (while meanwhile creating a strong assertion of identity) ensured the tremendous success of the Finnish pavilion at the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris (designed by Gesellius, Lindgren and Saarinen, who went on to design Helsinki’s National Museum). In the case of south-eastern Europe, the study and appreciation of local folklore as national heritage was not only tardier, but also more slanted towards the picturesque values of peasant art. It was not until the late 1920s that Balkan architects started to explore folk and vernacular registers as a meaningful response to the conditions of modernity.

One approach defines and affirms an identity through authenticity, the other through historicity. At universal exhibitions, pavilions from the Nordic countries tended to stress the vernacular (in Paris, in 1867, the Swedes displayed a replica of a famous 15th-century farmhouse, the Norwegians one of a medieval granary), as opposed to the elaborate historicism of the Balkan nations. Balkan historicism was often presented through religious edifices, frequently the work of foreign architects (the first to appreciate the heritage value of local architecture). Such foreign involvement seemed to confirm the lack of intrinsic historical stability in these “oriental” territories; that pattern was especially pronounced in the colonial context, where the colonizers were the first to articulate the identity of the colonized.

There are, then, two modes of peripheral self-assertion – one which invoked the prestige of history, the other aiming for transhistorical authenticity. For the first, the nation was reflected in the glory of the past (as preserved by the majestic monuments, hence the recurrent reference to Byzantine art), for the second, in the local environment.

The ambiguity of centre-periphery relations comes to the fore in the Habsburg Empire. Its complex structure, involving fraught power relations as well as efficient patterns of artistic exchange, was reflected in the various architectural expressions developed within its territories. The richness of these architectures resulted, on the one hand, from a role division between the historical and the vernacular mode, and, on the other hand, from an emphasis on the diversity of the empire’s folk sources. This model of a harmonious articulation of different particularisms, projected onto the background of a robustly affirmed historicity, caused later commenters to insist on the narrative quality of these architectural styles: “buildings that speak”, their multitude of languages reflecting the multitude of distinct communities within the empire.

The development of a (new) architecture able to convey identity went hand in hand with the growth of architectural history. Historians provided intellectual support for architects in stimulating and legitimizing their designs, and in many cases the two professions overlapped. This common effort shaped the notion of heritage, which became a central element in the definition of national cultures. While historical studies and a philosophy of history helped to underwrite the new architecture, the institutional consolidation of architecture – involving public restoration and preservation projects – turned the buildings of the past into actual monuments and into national icons and pantheons.

History and folklore (the aforementioned main reservoirs for nationally inspired architecture) both became the object of preservationist policies during the 19th century and, in even greater intensity, the 20th. The Romantic quest for the nation’s essential character shifted intellectual interests from idealized classicism to a newly revalorized national-vernacular heritage embodied in historical remains and documents and in folkways. Painters played an important role in uniting these elements into iconic spectacle: their ability to depict the minute details of ruins and buildings (while rendering them picturesquely emblematic) was eagerly employed by national monuments commissions for their first inventory albums. Johann Christian Dahl, for instance, was active in depicting castles, stave churches, menhirs, but also farmers in their traditional Norwegian costumes, and in taking active part in preservation efforts as one of the founders of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments. Such historicist interest in the vernacular resulted in the northern countries in the collecting of farmhouses and religious buildings, opened to the public at the turn of the century as museums of folk or traditional architecture – Skansen (1891), Bygdǿy (1894), Aarhus (1912), Arnhem (1918). At the same time and on the opposite side of the European continent, the Romanian photographer Alexandru Bellu developed a similar picture collection, which he used as a setting for picturesque photographs for young girls dressed in folk costumes. Thus, before prescriptive schemes emerged from the universal exhibition installations, the interstice between folklore and vernacular architecture was already an object national interest and cultivation.

More than with vernacular heritage, the great majority of monumentalization and preservation efforts revolved around historically important buildings. Such buildings were turned into ultimate symbols of the national spirit and achievements – Cologne Cathedral reaching its apotheosis in 1880. An architectural-monumental canon was established worldwide and furnished a potent reservoir for national rhetoric, being regularly and repeatedly copied, quoted or even reconstructed from scratch. Such reconstructions, presented as reparation acts after “traumatic” demolitions – like Moscow’s emblematic Church of Christ the Saviour, demolished in 1931 and rebuilt between 1995 and 2001 – are proofs that architecture is still strongly connected with the idea of national identity.

The strength of the principles mentioned in Fletcher’s above-quoted “Tree of Architecture” endured beyond World War I, which resulted in the recognized independence of numerous new nation-states. These principles evolved along with stylistic notions on how to translate identity into architectural forms, both heavily influenced by the advent of modernism. A different sensibility of belonging and rootedness developed, repudiating historicism and discarding most earlier expressions of architectural nationalism and regionalism. This process took hape during the rise of extremist nationalism and the powerful instrumentalization of architecture by totalitarian regimes. Yet the widely-heralded failure of the 19th-century quest for national and regional identity proved to be more or less illusory; what was dismissed as an obsolete historic(ist) fashion turned out to have enduring viability, especially in the colonial context, where established identity-constructing patterns continued to be reproduced.

But the most durable influence of 19th-century principles persisted – paradoxically – in the tenets of modern architecture. The modernists’ shift of sensibility was less radical than they pretended – indeed, modernism prolonged the interest in a locally “contextualized” architecture with all its key factors: rapport with the local site, use of local materials, a certain sense of the genius loci, etc. From folklore and peasant architecture – thoroughly studied by some modernist architects, such as  the Turk Sedad Hakkı Eldem – interest turned to the vernacular, trading the specifics of the picturesque for generic essence. As early as 1900, Otto Wagner’s students had begun to show a fascination with the “Mediterranean” and the Balkan house, thereby anticipating Le Corbusier’s 1911 Voyage d’Orient; in America we see a focus on the traditional dwelling in Frank Lloyd Wright’s various interpretations and in Lewis Mumford’s theories. The emphasis was on the “essentials” of architecture, on its functionality and on the “authenticity” of its designs – core values praised in the vernacular since the days of Pugin and Ruskin.

The influence of these attitudes still made itself felt when the crisis of modernism in the 1950s led to a reappraisal of different forms of regionalism (henceforth dubbed “new regionalism” and later, starting in the 1980s, “critical regionalism”). Critical regionalism flourishes in contemporary architecture, in a time marked by globalization and a quest for environmental sustainability.

Word Count: 4946
1.1.4.1/c https://doi.org/10.5117/9789462981188/ngHO4H76tIYD0SuQAH8D9Ogr https://e-rn.ie/survey-14