Architecture and Politics

I would like to study, eventually, the connection between aesthetics (specifically architecture) and politics. When I told this to my mom, she laughed at me disbelievingly and then said she was sure I'd find a way to make it work (recent conversation with my mom: Me: "Mom, do I have a nasally voice?" Mom: "No. Yours is piercing."). This just doesn't seem like a far-fetched idea to me. Politics is concerned with what it means to be human, what it means to live in society, what man's relationship is to the divine (esp. insofar as it interacts with the political order). Clearly aesthetic considerations are important to us as humans in our interactions with others. The very urge to construct beautiful, gratuitously beautiful, things, itself, points to something that is profound and interesting and unique in humans. The decorative elements that we add to the places that we live, work, and worship could be explained as part of a struggle for power and position, but I think that they offer much more insight than that. Our urge that is expressed in what is not necessary points at the divine and spiritual part of people.

Hegel on art: "...[A]rt is often key, and in many nations the sole key, to understanding their philosophy and religion. Art ... [displays] even the highest [reality] sensuously, bringing it thereby nearer to the senses, to feeling and to nature's mode of appearance."

And Hegel on architecture: "[Architecture's] task consists in so manipulating external inorganic nature, that, as an external world conformable to art, it becomes cognate in spirit. ... [A]rchitecture is the first to open the way for the adequate actuality of the god..."