Date:
Location: Washington, DC , United States School of Architecture, The Catholic University of AmericaEmail: Jacqueline Taylor: jst2z@virginia.edu or Nathaniel R. Walker : walkernr@cua.edu
Website: https://www.latrobechaptersah.org/current-symposium
The Latrobe Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians welcomes paper proposals for its Fifteenth Biennial Symposium, "Architecture and National Identity," taking place Saturday, March 21–Sunday, March 22, 2026 at The Catholic University of America's School of Architecture, Washington, DC.
Papers should engaging with past entanglements of national identity and buildings, landscapes, and urban form. They may focus on any country or period.
Call for Papers:
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:
Submissions:
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:
