The Architecture of the State and Statelessness

Abstract

The phrases “state architecture” and “architecture of the state” today might be understood to refer not to buildings at all, but to the formal arrangements of power in sovereign states; the composition of a representative assembly, for example, and the relationship between the judiciary and the executive; the role of the bureaucracy and ministers of state and other such arrangements that define who can legitimately exercise state power. Such a usage implies that the word architecture principally denotes a diagram of functions and responsibilities. This editors’ themed issue of Fabrications is dedicated to a more expansive, but also more concrete and conventional idea of “the architecture of the state.” For the work included here, architecture unquestionably involves the design and use of buildings. Yet, each of the papers in the current issue also coveys a sense that architecture is inexorably involved in delineating relations of power. One of the abiding roles of architecture historically has been to produce designs for buildings that represent and house state functions. Official residences for heads of state, parliament buildings, courts, diplomatic missions, barracks and armouries, as well as the departmental headquarters for treasuries and other governmental functions, enact and enable state power, but they also make the state visible as an entity. Architecture is one of the ways in which states represent themselves to their citizens or political subjects and to other states. The frontispiece for the original edition of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) – perhaps the most explicit figure of the state produced in political philosophy – is an etching by Thomas Bosse and is dominated by a colossal figure bearing a sword and a mitre overlooking an orderly city (Fig. 1). When one looks closely at the cover, the representative role of architecture in figuring state power is obvious. Beneath the main figure are depictions of civil and ecclesiastical authority, most prominently a castle and a church. Buildings were thus presented as clear emblems of the state. Perhaps because state power is so often figured through buildings and urban ensembles, those who dispute the claims of the state have also used architecture to articulate their own relationship to power and political agency. In Australia, for example, First Nations people have created numerous tent embassies, the most famous being that established in front of the old Parliament House in Canberra from 1972. The very clear meaning of this gesture was that the Australian government does not possess legitimate FABRICATIONS 2022, VOL. 32, NO. 3, 335–339 https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2023.2202529