One of the most spectacular encounters between architecture and politics takes place when a new social order is established following a military victory or revolution. Ephemeral buildings are erected to celebrate the change, some of which take on a permanent form. Parades and demonstrations define new urban topographies, often destined to endure in the shape of cities.
At the same time, a kind of negative architecture is emerging, with the vandalism of the new powers, quick to erase the built traces of previous regimes.
Many of the projects undertaken since the end of the 19th century to manifest the force of emerging regimes in buildings or urban layouts can be placed under the banner of the total work of art, as defined by Richard Wagner, operating on multiple scales and using distinct media, but forming part of the same architectural chorus.
The analysis focuses on episodes relating to the French Revolution and Empire, the Russian and German Revolutions, Italian Fascism and the Third Reich. In the colonial sphere, where the staging of domination made extensive use of the architectural register, the focus is on cities such as Algiers and Casablanca, where the forms of colonial rupture were also part of a reappropriation of existing devices, whose meaning was transformed by interventions of symbolic significance.
