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Challenging the long-established idea of the Mediterranean as the cradle of modern architecture, this contribution argues that due consideration should be given to moments of profound change, thereby splitting the Mediterranean into its fragments. We may thus restore to its extraordinary cities the many and varied architectural traditions that were able to nurture and blend: the much-debated mediterraneità (Mediterraneity) turns out to be far less 'monolithic' in its expression. Along this line of thoughts, schools and museums built in Greece from 1923 to the aftermath of WWII may well reveal the role of architecture, when called upon to express the founding values of a collective identity. The dialectic between tradition and innovation, eclecticism and modernism, uncovers its meaning case by case. ; This contribution is partly based on research in Greece carried out with funding from the Greek Scholarships Foundation IKY (1999-2000), the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2002), and the A. Onassis Foundation (2006). It is partly based on Pallini, C. (2015). Il moderno nel farsi e rifarsi della storia. Riflessioni sull'architettura della scuola e del museo in Turchia, Grecia, Egitto. In P. Carlotti, D. Nencini & P. Posocco (Eds), Nuovi Mediterranei (pp. 222-241). Milan: Franco Angeli This work was conducted under the project MODSCAPES - Modernist Reinventions of the Rural Landscape (HERA.15.097). This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 649307. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Abstract
This article proposes a critical analysis of recent interpretations made to the history of architecture and urban planning in the Portuguese colonial context in the twentieth century, particularly in the former African territories. More generally, it intends to explore how the internal history produced by specific fields of activity, such as architecture or urbanism, can reinforce the logic of a national and nationalized history. This effect is due partly to the fact that the legitimacy of these fields is largely dependent on the national identification in the context of activities that are internationalized. I will argue that the specific field of activity, while creating this internal discourse, can directly or indirectly produce representations of the nation, its history and its people on a larger scale, penetrating popular culture and influencing a shared common sense. In the case in question, the internal discourse on architectural and urbanistic works, on authors and styles, eventually reinforces an idealized and idyllic image of Portuguese colonialism.

In order to shed light on the ways in which the adoption of a historiographical point of view regarding the construction of national identity can be depicted through the conception of architecture exhibitions we could compare the following two exhibitions: World War II and the American Dream: How Wartime Building Changed a Nation, which took place at the National Building Museum in 1994, and Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War, which took place at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2011 and was transferred to the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris and latter to the MAXXI in Rome in 2014. The first exhibition included in its material a range of building projects undertaken during wartime; its main aspiration was to show how they contributed to technical innovations and social changes concerning postwar architectural production. The catalog that accompanied this exhibition addressed the chronology and architectural, technological, social, military and planning legacy of wartime. The exhibition aimed to show how the materials of wartime building and the visual language of their representation influenced architecture. The focus of the exhibition was centered on the nation, since, as the poster at its entrance reflected, its purpose was to present "how a wartime building change a nation". By contrast, the second exhibition, which treated wartime technological products as components of the puzzle of the interactions of different national contexts, escaped the danger of celebrating economic productivity, political organization, and social consensus within the constrains of a national perspective. This was made possible through the inventive narrative zigzags of its sequence, which was based on cross-sections that shed light on the policies undertaken in parallel by the belligerents jumping from one significant place to another, from Los Angeles to London and from Auschwitz to Moscow. In this case, the use of archival material coming from different institutions in different national contexts as well as their historical interpretation played a key role. Its main purpose was to make visible and comprehensible to the spectator that every fragment of the history narrated can take on different meanings if the interpreter adopts a different point of view. The curator based the research and its display on archival material coming from different institutions in order to make explicit the deformations that can take place due to the change of the perspective from which the events are diagnosed. The historical archival research preceding the exhibition was based on material coming from different institutions. Instead of producing consistencies its narrative aimed to reveal disruptions. My presentation aims to show how architecture exhibitions are able to reveal different sets of cultural meanings through the strategies according to which the artifacts, that constitute their material, are articulated, and through the tactics according to which the sequence of their narrative is conceived, functioning as a vehicle of transnational historiographical research.

International audience ; This article tries the architectural transformation of the central public space in the Ukrainian capital in the course of the historical changes. From the politically oriented architectural representations, the author establishes the link between urban reality and evolving artistic modes of production. ; Cet article retrace la transformation architecturale de l'espace public central de la capitale ukrainienne au fil des changements historiques. A partir des représentations architecturales politiquement orientées l'auteure établit les liens entre la réalité urbaine et les modes de production en évolution.

International audience ; This article tries the architectural transformation of the central public space in the Ukrainian capital in the course of the historical changes. From the politically oriented architectural representations, the author establishes the link between urban reality and evolving artistic modes of production. ; Cet article retrace la transformation architecturale de l'espace public central de la capitale ukrainienne au fil des changements historiques. A partir des représentations architecturales politiquement orientées l'auteure établit les liens entre la réalité urbaine et les modes de production en évolution.

Technics, Memory and the Architecture of History December 17, 2011 In the light of massive catastrophes – the earthquakes near Sendai and Christchurch, the tsunamis of Acheh and Katrina's devastation of New Orleans – the question of urban and architectural reconstruction invokes the question of remembering. What is this 'past' that we remember and on which we base our future reconstructions? What images of the past do we call upon in our decisions to build or not to build – and how do they negotiate the terrain between memory and history, nature and culture, technology and sustainability, planning and responding, tradition and innovation, foundations and interstices? Albrecht Duerer 1514 Melancholia I. (detail) To Bernard Stiegler, the image that we recall in/as history is not an "image in general". Rather it is an image with an irreducible materiality, inscribed in a technical history. That is to say, the image-object of history is given to us; we inherit it and make it our own. History has therefore a technicity and its own historicity: the architecture of its images contains technical traces of their construction. The task of the historian becomes more complex in the light of such mnemotechnics. In recalling the past, no transcendental signified or image precedes the image-object. The event of memory calls for an imagination that does not separate mental images from image-objects and their associated technics of construction and dissemination. As Lebbeus Woods says, the inventions and radical reconstructions that make survival possible under extreme, catastrophic conditions provide new ways of living in a paradoxical state of perpetual destruction and construction. Here, the image-object of the past maintains a dynamics of simultaneous political, technological, epistemological and personal change. The practices of architecture, design and art – when treated as images with technicities that produce an artificial already-there of the past that is not lived but imposed – become useful strata to identify and ...

Technics, Memory and the Architecture of History December 17, 2011 In the light of massive catastrophes – the earthquakes near Sendai and Christchurch, the tsunamis of Acheh and Katrina's devastation of New Orleans – the question of urban and architectural reconstruction invokes the question of remembering. What is this 'past' that we remember and on which we base our future reconstructions? What images of the past do we call upon in our decisions to build or not to build – and how do they negotiate the terrain between memory and history, nature and culture, technology and sustainability, planning and responding, tradition and innovation, foundations and interstices? Albrecht Duerer 1514 Melancholia I. (detail) To Bernard Stiegler, the image that we recall in/as history is not an "image in general". Rather it is an image with an irreducible materiality, inscribed in a technical history. That is to say, the image-object of history is given to us; we inherit it and make it our own. History has therefore a technicity and its own historicity: the architecture of its images contains technical traces of their construction. The task of the historian becomes more complex in the light of such mnemotechnics. In recalling the past, no transcendental signified or image precedes the image-object. The event of memory calls for an imagination that does not separate mental images from image-objects and their associated technics of construction and dissemination. As Lebbeus Woods says, the inventions and radical reconstructions that make survival possible under extreme, catastrophic conditions provide new ways of living in a paradoxical state of perpetual destruction and construction. Here, the image-object of the past maintains a dynamics of simultaneous political, technological, epistemological and personal change. The practices of architecture, design and art – when treated as images with technicities that produce an artificial already-there of the past that is not lived but imposed – become useful strata to identify and render problematic civic values and democratic processes. What are some of the key image-objects that architecturalise historiography, particularly the historiographies of architecture, design and art? What are the ontological conditions surrounding these historical image-objects, their construction and dissemination? What alternative topologies of memorialising the past are imaginable: narratival, conversational, oral and gestural? What images are inherited by the historian, and how does the interior (psychic) condition of the historian assimilate (or not) the otherness of the image-objects that arrive from the outside? Taking seriously the metaphor of the cinematic, the temporalisation of the image-object and its absorption into the sphere of production, and the indeterminacy of images that carry the technics of interhuman relations, this issue of Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts [1] invokes the theatre of the historian's individuation alongside history's mnemotechnics that organize the images which appear whenever memory is invoked. We invite you to contribute to the forthcoming issue – either in the refereed or non-refereed part. Interstices accepts both academic and practice oriented, fully written as well as visual, contributions for double blind refereeing and welcomes articles related to the issue theme. For the refereed part, we welcome submission of 5000 word papers and visual submissions with an accompanying text of approximately 500 words. For the non-refereed part, we welcome papers up to 2500 words and project reports and reviews of up to 1000 words. Please visit our website and check out the Notes for Contributors for details about the reviewing process, copyright issues and formatting: http://www.interstices.ac.nz/. Please send your submission to Andrew Douglas (adouglas@aut.ac.nz) by 28 February 2012. Authors accepted for the reviewing process will receive confirmation and a schedule in early March and the journal will go to publication in November 2012. We look forward to your contribution! [1] Interstices: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts received an "A" rating in the 2009 and 2010 Australian Research Council's Journal Ranking Exercise. See also http://www.2020publication.info/