Mobile Architecture & War

As part of this module’s examination of mobile architectures and spatial mobilities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this lecture investigates mobile architectures in relation to war in the history of the twentieth century. The lecture offers a study of constructions of global activity and the aesthetics and politics of the built environment within or in response to armed conflict, such as: the design and construction of fortifications or camouflage at the scale of cities and landscapes; the work of architects and planners as wartime designers and mappers; the instrumentalization of the built environment and monumental sites as weapons; destructions and constructions of memory via the built environment; human displacement as a spatial strategy by individuals, families, and communities to respond to armed conflict; the emergence of new technologies and industries to address reorganizations of space and human life; new forms of seeing that have emerged from war; aesthetic practices that concern themselves with the movement of masses, cultural memory, human rights, and social justice; new conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism and difference, and sovereignty and citizenship, which emerge from mobile architectures that sometimes serve and sometimes resist the state.