Architecture, Democracy and Emotions

The Politics of Feeling since 1945

Till Großmann, Philipp Nielsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351124560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

After 1945 it was not just Europe's parliamentary buildings that promised to house democracy: hotels in Turkey and Dutch shopping malls proposed new democratic attitudes and feelings. Housing programs in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union were designed with the aim of creating new social relations among citizens and thus better, more equal societies. Architecture, Democracy, and Emotions focuses on these competing promises of consumer democracy, welfare democracy, and socialist democracy. Spanning from Turkey across Eastern and Western Europe to the United States, the chapters investigate the emotional politics of housing and representation during the height of the Cold War, as well as its aftermath post-1989.

The book assembles detailed research on how the claims and aspirations of being "democratic" influenced the affects of architecture, and how these claims politicized space. Architecture, Democracy, and Emotions contributes to the study of Europe's "democratic age" beyond Cold War divisions without diminishing political differences. The combination of an emotional history of democracy with an architectural history of emotions distinguishes the book's approach from other recent investigations into the interconnection of mind, body, and space.

1

Designed to represent

Parliamentary architecture, conceptions of democracy, and emotions in the postwar Netherlands

Carla Hoetink and Harm Kaal

Introduction

In 1992, the Dutch Parliament moved from its old complex of buildings at the Inner Court (het Binnenhof) in The Hague to a new accommodation adjacent to its old surroundings.¹ After a first visit to the new plenary hall (see Figure 1.1), a Christian-Democratic MP sadly remarked that “we have all greatly underestimated the emotional and historical value of the old plenary. Alas, now it is too late.”² A former parliamentary journalist and member of the Senate characterized the new building as “too smooth, too transparent, too cold” and likened it to an airport or hospital. For him, the built environment in which MPs were to operate sent the wrong message: “it suggests an ideal that will never become real: the ideal that parliamentary politics needs to be rational.”³ These feelings of loss and nostalgia attached to built space and its political interpretation show us that not only politicians themselves, but also the environment in which they operate—in which they debate, vote, and mingle with each other—express or trigger emotions. In short, it shows that democracy is something emotional. In this contribution, we will explore both the emotions that have been evoked by the material surroundings in which Dutch MPs have operated in the postwar years, and the emotions that have been inscribed into the built space by its designers and users.

FIGURE 1.1 The new plenary hall to which Parliament moved in April 1992 (2008).

Source: Wikimedia CC0.

One of the main arguments of this volume is that architecture offers an excellent approach to explore how governments and politicians have made sense of the emotional relationship between state and society. In this chapter, we will use discussions among politicians, mainly MPs, journalists, and architects about the construction of a new parliamentary building to assess their ideas about the emotions that the built space of the center of Dutch politics could or is supposed to convey and will analyze the connection between these emotions and conceptions of democracy. Our main focus is on emotions as an aim and as an experience. Studying parliamentary debates about the plans for the construction of a new building can help to reveal which emotions politicians wanted to inscribe into the building they perceived as the heart of Dutch democracy. Moreover, once the plans had materialized and the new building was realized, parliamentary and public debates continued and cast light on how politicians and the public, journalists in particular, experienced the built environment of parliament and the emotions it triggered.

Acknowledging that emotions are both linguistic expressions and corporeal experiences, our analysis is mainly based on the written reflection of these emotions in the minutes of the meetings of parliament and in newspaper articles. In the first section of this chapter, we will discuss the architecture of political representation as it developed with the rise of parliamentary democracies in the nineteenth century. Studying parliamentary architecture from the viewpoint of political history helps us gain a better insight into what and whom parliament as an institution aimed to represent. Historical research is needed, for it can provide clues about how societies have read and made sense of the symbolism of the parliamentary built environment in changing ways. The second section offers an analysis of the discussion about and realization of a new parliamentary building in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In particular, we will study the emotions that were inscribed into the plans for a new home for the legislature, as well as the emotions that were triggered by the built and material environment of Dutch Parliament. How did Dutch representatives want citizens to experience their institutions? Which values and emotions were inscribed into the built space of parliament by the architect? In the third section we explore how MPs, members of government, and political journalists responded to the new building. What feelings did it trigger? Their response to the new built environment provides insight into how they connected the material environment to notions of democracy.

Our focus on the symbolic meaning of parliamentary architecture and the reading of the parliamentary built environment as an emotional landscape is part of a more general trend in historical scholarship on parliamentary history and the history of parliament as an institution, a trend that is often referred to as the “spatial” and “emotional” turn. For a proper understanding of how we intend to approach parliament in this chapter, it is necessary to first return to some of the previous turns, starting with the linguistic one, which has had a profound impact on the field of parliamentary history since the 1990s. Several scholars have zoomed in on historical parliamentary discourse as a distinct language of politics, highlighting the specific features of parliamentary speech acts and the rhetorical nature of parliamentary debates. Among these are Thomas Mergel’s study on the culture and political languages in the Weimar Parliament and Henk te Velde’s recent work on the art of parliamentary speech in nineteenth-century Britain and France.⁴ Moreover, historians and political linguists have explored insults, violations, and disruptions to establish the limits or boundaries of parliamentary discourse and to reveal institutional principles of conduct and normative forms of politeness.⁵ A third body of work is based on e-humanities approaches and has resulted in studies on the self-representation of MPs or the historical development of parliamentary discourse, such as a study on the changing role of the Second World War in postwar Dutch parliamentary debate.⁶

The cultural turn, too, has produced a series of new approaches to parliamentary history that center on parliament as an “institution” with a distinct culture or “corporate identity,” which historians try to reveal by studying parliamentary performative culture: the traditions, rites, rituals, and ceremonies of parliament, as well as its architecture and material culture more generally.⁷ The latter was initiated first and foremost by historians working on early modern parliamentary history, most prominently by Chris Kyle and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger.⁸ In Theater of State, an inspiring study on the history of parliament in seventeenth-century England, Kyle discusses practices of note taking during parliamentary sessions, the use of ink and pencils, the distribution of notes, and how this contributed to the constitution of a public sphere.⁹ Delphine Gardey has adopted a similar approach in her study on the nineteenth-century Palais-Bourbon. In Le linge du Palais-Bourbon: corps, matérialité et genre du politique à l’ère démocratique, Gardey discusses the location, exterior, and interior of the Palais-Bourbon, which housed the French National Assembly after the French Revolution, to show how space and the materiality of the building were given political meaning and “represented” the norms and values of the French Republic. She particularly focusses on the tension between the articulation of political values and the demands of the practical use of the building by its inhabitants, ranging from the MPs to the staff who were responsible for maintenance and equipment.¹⁰

Late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century parliamentary architecture has also drawn scholarly attention in recent years.¹¹ Here, the work of the American political scientist Charles Goodsell has been very influential. Goodsell was one of the first to argue that the architecture of parliament, its interior, surface, and objects have political and symbolic meaning. Through their architectural style and program of decorations, parliaments represent political norms and national values. Through their location on sites of special historical or symbolic significance, they suggest continuity and order, reflecting specific aspects of the national political culture. However, referring to Churchill’s famous quote: “we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us,” Goodsell also points to the psychological and mental influence exerted by the shape, the size, the design, and other spatial qualities of assembly halls and the buildings in which they are located.¹²

With the notable exception of British Parliament, most national parliaments in the modern sense—that is, as institutions—date from the nineteenth century. Emerging as the new core political institution between 1814 and 1848, parliaments had to compete with the established power of the elites of monarchy and court for recognition, respect, and authority. National parliaments rose to power as a result of electoral and constitutional reforms that secured parliament a position of preponderance over the king or queen and his or her government. But to visualize this ascendancy to power and to gain authority as the prime political and representative body, parliaments also had to display the traditional features of status, power, authority, and nationhood, much like the early modern architecture of palaces, squares, parks, triumphal arcs, and grand avenues had done. In this sense parliamentary architecture was meant to arouse feelings of awe, national pride, and enthusiasm. To put it differently: modern representative bodies developed an emotional program of their own, full of spectacular, ceremonial, and architectural aspects harking back to monarchic or other early-modern forms of legitimatization and expression.¹³ The next section will elaborate on how, from the conception of the system of parliamentary democracy in the nineteenth century onwards, discussions about the built environment of parliament reveal—sometimes conflicting—conceptions of parliamentary democracy.

The architecture of parliament and Dutch parliamentary democracy in the nineteenth century

“Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”: this wedding rhyme in fact fits the history of the first “modern,” that is, post-revolutionary, parliaments in Europe. European parliaments in the early decades of the nineteenth century usually were seated in the former quarters of their precursors, the Estates or Estates-General, or they took up residence in former royal palaces or other representative public buildings. The first Dutch Parliament of 1796 occupied the ballroom of the expelled Stadtholder, not to leave this seat until 1992, when a new assembly hall was created within the same medieval complex of buildings. The French National Assembly has been seated in the Palais-Bourbon since the late eighteenth century. The Portuguese Parliament in the liberal revolution of 1820 appropriated a former Benedictine monastery. This changed in the second half of the nineteenth century, when a range of parliaments across Europe chose to commission the construction of new houses. In the Netherlands, too, politicians stepped forward and argued in favor of a new accommodation for parliament. Although these plans would not materialize, they nevertheless “stirred the emotions of many,” as one MP put it in 1863.¹⁴ The debates about a new building reveal the differences of opinion among Dutch politicians about the position of parliament vis-à-vis other political institutions and the people it claimed to represent.

In 1814, after the defeat of Napoleon and the establishment of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Dutch Parliament (in Dutch: the Staten-Generaal) took up camp in a small palace in a corner of the Inner Court in The Hague. Up until the revolt of 1830, meetings of Parliament also took place in Brussels, the other seat of government of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Inner Court had been the center of Dutch po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Architectural history of emotions—emotional history of democracy
• 1. Designed to represent: Parliamentary architecture, conceptions of democracy, and emotions in the postwar Netherlands
• 2. Building Bonn: Affects, politics, and architecture in postwar West Germany
• 3. Consumer democracy and the emotional investment in modern architecture in postwar Turkey: The Istanbul Hilton Hotel
• 4. Structures of feeling: Urban redevelopment as self-development in Dutch postwar architecture
• 5. Images, films, and emotions in postwar architecture in Britain
• 6. Affective economies of race and housing in postwar New York City
• 7. “Palaces in our hearts”: Caring for Khrushchevki
• 8. Defending modernist architecture in Poland: Spaces of state, emotions, and democracy
• Index