This book comprehensively examines architecture, urban planning, and civic perception in three modern cities as they transform into national capitals through an entangled, transnational process that involves an imaginative geography based on embellished memories of classical Athens. Schinkel's classicist architecture in Berlin, especially the principle of tectonics at its core, came to be adopted effectively at faraway cities in East Asia, merging with the notion of national polity as Imperial Japan sought to reinvent Tokyo and mutating into an inevitable reflection of modern civilization upon reaching colonial Seoul, all of which give reason to ruminate over the phantasmagoria of modernity.

Jin-Sung Chun is a professor of history at Busan National University of Education.

Prologue: The Phantasm(agoria) of Modernity

1. In Search of Prussian Classicism

2. Beyond the Prussia of Asia

3. An Eerie Phantasmagoria of Athena

Epilogue: Sites of Memory, Spaces of Hope