CIVICNESS: ARCHITECTURE AND THE POLITICS OF THE PUBLIC REALM
Guest editors: Anna Livia Friel & Agustina Labarca Gatica
The term character in architecture has long been contested. During the 17th century, it was defined as rational manifestation of a building’s function; later, Romanticism reframed it as an expression of personal and, by extension, national identity. Civic character of buildings, however, is often easier to recognize than to define. Historically, it has relied on a codified architectural language—designed to make power legible and to support the process of nation-building. These operations are deeply bounded to formal representation. Civic buildings tens to embody a social consensus—whether negotiated or imposed—that renders them intelligible to both experts and the public. Yet such consensus is never fixed in time, nor immune to reinterpretation or contestation.
Despite their different histories, geographies, technologies, and formal expressions, civic character remains recognizable in projects as different as Washington D.C. and Brasília. The symbolic resonance of the attacks on their congressional buildings in 2021 and 2023 underscores how these spaces are widely perceived as architectural embodiments of democracy itself. Both projects stand as two of the most ambitious experiments in civic architecture, yet resisting simplification: U.S. neoclassicism defies canonization, while projects like Brasília or Chandigarh are at the center of a modernist civic identity—even though beyond Europe and despite early modernism’s resistance to the notion of character.
Beyond theoretical positions—whether prioritizing spatial relations over symbolic expression, critiquing or defending a canon, or approaching architecture as a cultural, technical, or artistic practice—we continue to recognize civic character and differentiate the ideological frameworks that shape it. Today, as many political leaders drift away from the liberal democratic values while holding onto defined architectural visions (though not necessarily realized), the relevance of civic character resurfaces with urgency. Can architecture still aspire to public meaning without civic ambition?
While initiatives like the Green New Deal in the U.S. and the New European Bauhaus in Europe have captured attention producing a renewed interest on public architecture, they have failed to produce a tangible architectural agenda. In contrast, Latin America continues to face a pressing demand for public buildings and infrastructure, opening a fertile ground for rethinking what civic architecture can and should be today.
Materia Arquitectura 29 invites contributions that critically interrogate civicness in the contemporary built environment. We welcome submissions that explore its historical transformations, symbolic tensions, political potentials, and imagining its possible futures across different geopolitical contexts.
We are particularly open to contributions that employ emerging methodologies, archival research, or critical case studies. Submissions may address built projects, unbuilt visions, or broader frameworks of public architecture—especially in contexts of crisis, institutional change and emerging political prospect.
MATERIA ARQUITECTURA is a bi-annual publication on architecture, published since 2009 by the School of Architecture of the Universidad San Sebastián. As a documentation, dissemination and reference tool, the magazine aims to broaden knowledge of the discipline from a critical perspective, with the aim of opening new discourses on contemporary architecture.
MATERIA ARQUITECTURA is open to the entire academic and professional community, both national and international. The journal has a special interest in publishing works related to the theoretical research and practical production of contemporary architecture.
CALL FOR PAPERS
The editors invite you to submit papers reflecting the state of art in the discipline, derived from academic research.
MATERIA ARQUITECTURA N°29
Publication date: December 2025.
Submission deadline: August 30, 2025