This paper seeks to open a debate on whether it makes sense to expand the concept of transitional justice to cover architectural legacies that are politically problematic from a democratic point of view. The main argument advanced here is the following: condoning public monuments that symbolically humiliate certain groups is both normatively inconsistent and politically risky for aspiring constitutional democracies. While democracies can choose from a variety of possible avenues of disavowal, certain ways of dealing with objectionable public monuments are normatively problematic. Building on an exploration of it means to be symbolically humiliated in a democracy, the paper proposes several potential avenues of thinking about architectural transitional justice. As illustrations I then discuss two case-studies, one of a racist monument (The Voortrekker Monument in South Africa), the other of a totalitarian construction (The People's House in Romania).
