Nation Building: Embassy Architecture: Call for Proposals
Here is your chance to contribute to an exciting new Forum on the architecture of Embassies (and other built examples of national cultural projection such as Cultural Institutes, or Expo Pavilions). These buildings are perhaps where there is the most intimate embrace between diplomacy, foreign policy, and culture. It is a long-term relationship – buildings are built to last – and the choices that are made can have long-lasting effects. Buildings reflect the times they are commissioned in, with all of their competing and evolving agendas and problematics, but they can also literally shape the times and the spaces that they occupy. They are the sharp end of cultural diplomacy, but paradoxically they barely figure in discussions about it, perhaps because they occupy a niche beyond the performative nature of most cultural diplomacy activities, with their focus on the impact of brief (ephemeral) events. They reflect, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes deliberately, sometimes anachronistically, sometimes obscurely, sometimes idealistically, tropes in national narratives: tropes (pervasive narratives used in order to create social facts) in nation-building. Such tropes can find concrete expressions in Embassy buildings. That does not mean, however, that they do not engage critically with issues of history, identity, security, meaning.
If you would like to help us understand the complex phenomenon of Embassy Architecture, and even better, if you have an argument you would like to make, now is your opportunity, by responding to this call for proposals for a Forum on the topic from the Hague Journal of Diplomacy.
We welcome proposals from academics and practitioners, or from people with views who want to engage with an important and exciting topic.