© "We Know How To Order," Bryony Roberts and the South Shore Drill Team, Chicago, 2015.
How has architecture mediated relations within and between American government and society? Specifically, how have contradictions of federal governance been enacted architecturally? How has governmentality - the conduct and struggles of citizenship - been activated through architecture? And, how have tensions between government and capitalism played out between American government centers and surrounding cities? This talk focuses upon Boston's notorious 1960s combination of federal, state, and municipal buildings in vast open spaces, which embodied contradictions of the postwar American welfare state and activated complex citizen subjectivities - a fairground federalism continuous with both City Beautiful and modernist civic center conceptions. This talk, too, as precursor for a possible larger project on American governance, governmentality, and postwar government centers, proffers additional examples, including Mies' Chicago Federal Center, as site of a 2015 youth drill team performance.