While the very existence of a “nation” requires geographical boundedness, locating the nation—not just as a territory, but as a set of ideas, customs, and power relations—imparts an enduring challenge. This is especially true as the very limits of a nation tend to surpass real boundaries, which in turn fail to describe, register, and capture ideas of citizenship. Architecture has long provided a critical medium for the production of the nation. Monuments, national malls, and embassies, are the most recognizable of its outputs, but even more mundane typologies—stadiums, airports, etc.—make tangible the abstractedness of the nation, while simultaneously controlling its image and reinforcing its power. But other spatial relations also provide alternative and perhaps less coercive readings of the nation. Urban protests that project a collective representation of the nation by performing its refusal and mounting violence around intensifying border conditions demonstrate how the nation is often rendered most visible by its fissures. The essays presented here perform their own readings of the nation’s materialization through various appropriations of space, demonstrating how architecture becomes both a vehicle and a catalyst for shifting applications of state sovereignty.