Maur Dessauvage

Maur Dessauvage is a PhD candidate in architecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP). He works on modern European architecture in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. His research interests include: aesthetics and ideology in architecture; historicism and philosophies of history; the intersection of nineteenth-century theories of style with the human sciences; and the history of art history. Along with Luca Arens and Hannah Pivo, he organized the first graduate student symposium at the Center of Comparative Media entitled Ministry and Mystery.

His dissertation, Monuments for a State to Come: Architecture, Historicism, and German State-building, 1815–1870, examines how German architects in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars were tasked with creating symbolic monuments to an imagined nation that had not yet achieved self-definition. By examining this turbulent and uncertain moment in European history, when the relationship between monarchical authority and democratic freedom was actively being negotiated, this project elucidates the dialectical relationship between the emergence of national histories and the physical construction of national monuments. By historicizing the rise of historicism, I argue that nineteenth-century attitudes towards history—far from neutral and value-free—were fundamentally shaped by the political genealogies and temporal regimes of the recently dissolved Holy Roman Empire. I explore how this political imaginary was given architectural form in the historicist theories and monuments of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Leo von Klenze, and Heinrich Hübsch, among others. While historicism became accepted as a purportedly secular and objective method of historical research in the second half of the nineteenth century, Monuments for a State to Come uncovers the earlier history of a different kind of historicism, one that sought to build upon the imperial past and invest it with new meaning.