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Although architecture was historically considered the most public of the arts and the interdependence between building and the public realm was a key feature of the post-war discourse, the process of postmodernization undermined the traditional structures of power through which architecture operated. At the center of this shakeup was the modern structure par excellence: the State. This dissertation analyzes the dissolution of the bond between architecture and the State through a double lens. First, this study is framed by the workings of an architect, Aldo Rossi, whose practice mirrored this transformation in a unique way, going from Mussolini’s Italy to Reagan’s America, from the Communist Party to Disneyland. The second lens is provided by a set of technological apparatuses that, in this pre-digital world, impacted the reach of the State and the boundaries of architecture. Drawing on the multifaceted root of the term “State,” this dissertation sets out to explore a series of case studies that addressed the need to re-state architecture – both in the sense of relocating architecture within new structures of power and in the sense of finding ways to keep reproducing it in those uncharted territories.

The following article focuses on Japan’s pavilion at the Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893, exploring the interplay between political dynamics and architecture’s material culture. This building is a crossroad of multiple histories and embodies one of the most significant points of convergence between the architectural cultures of Japan, Europe and the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. The fulcrum of this historical convergence is the mobilization of architecture as a tool to establish national identity – a fundamental instrument in the process of nation-building. The transformations of Japan in the aftermath of the 1868 Meiji Restoration shine a light on the complexities and contradictions that accompany such politicization of architecture, negotiating both exogenous and endogenous forces. In this study, particular attention is devoted to the role that building materials played in this realignment, pointing to the tension between Japan’s millenary tradition of timber construction, the European myth of stone as a demonstration of power, and the ephemerality of the world’s fairs of the turn of the century, as evidenced by Chicago’s plaster exposition, also known as the White City.