Affective disorder: architectural design for complex national identities

ABSTRACT

Underpinned by concepts drawn from postcolonial theory, this article speculates on the relationship between built form and the experience of difference. It critically examines cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha's conceptualisation of nation – focusing on ideas of the ‘performative’ and ‘pedagogical’ – as applied to frame specific works of architecture in the writing of Felipe Hernández. This analysis is then used as the foundation for two building reviews. Firstly, the National Museum of Australia, which reveals an emphasis on formal incoherence to reflect the plurality of national identity. This in-turn leads to a consideration of ‘affect’ as an alternative design hermeneutic in the pursuit of non-reductive methods to reflect the lived plurality of ‘nation-space’. This consideration is extended to a second building study: the Institut du Monde Arabe, which is used to advance ideas on the relationship between form (representation) and affect (non-representation) and the relative merits these may bring to a re-thinking of design approaches in contexts of complex national identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Architecture
• postcolonial theory
• national identity
• Homi K. Bhabha
• performative
• pedagogic
• affect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Samir Pandya is an architect and Assistant Head of the School of Architecture and Cities, University of Westminster, London. He has designed a wide range of award-winning projects in housing and education sectors, and has been a Visiting Professor to APIED School of Architecture & Urban Design, Vidhyanagar (India), an External Examiner at the University of Johannesburg (South Africa), and an External PhD Supervisor at the Università Iuav di Venezia, (Italy). He is currently an External PhD Supervisor at the University of Cyprus, and an External Examiner at the University of Dundee, Scotland. In addition to being a Co-Editor for National Identities (Taylor & Francis), he is an Editorial Board member for the architecture journal FOLIO (funded by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts), and Veranda, the peer-reviewed journal of Sushant School of Art & Architecture, Delhi, India.