Two exhibitions in the Victoria & Albert in London evoke architectural pasts in rather different ways. One exhibition is monographic and shows the work of William Kent, the other is thematic and introduces visitors to the colonial architecture of the British Empire. Nation-building, in German Nationenbildung, and empire-building, in German Weltreichbildung, converge in the question of the expression of power and economy through architecture. While the English terms focus on the physical building of a nation or an empire, their German equivalents concentrate more on the formative and pedagogical dimensions. Although in both exhibitions the question of power is seldom explicitly presented, implicitly it is the decisive one.
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