Yogyakarta and Surakarta are two cities on the island of Java, Indonesia, which are considered as the centres of Javanese culture. That identity has resulted from the existence of the royal court or kraton in each of them. Both cities have shared a similar history as descendants of the Mataram kingdom, the greatest kingdom in Java, which was divided into two in 1755. Both also share a similar physical layout of the palace, shown not only in the layout of the kraton compounds, which consist of seven hierarchical courtyards, but also in the names and the functions of the courtyards and buildings. They also share similar city layouts in which the palace located at the centre, two squares each at the northern and southern end of the kraton compounds, and a royal road, create a north-south axis which is claimed to be cosmological. However, the kratons have suffered different fates in the modern era. Since Indonesian Independence in 1945, Yogyakarta has been considered to be a ‘special region’, with its territory awarded a status equivalent to a province. Also the king is automatically appointed governor, while Surakarta is only recognised as a city, which is a part of the province of Central Java. While the kraton of Yogyakarta holds importance in Yogyakarta, with the acknowledgement of territory and the king’s political role as governor, the kraton of Surakarta has no influence in the city of Surakarta. The mayor of Surakarta city is elected by the people, and even in the 2010 election a candidate from the royal family of the kraton of Surakarta lost 10:90 to a non-kraton-related candidate. The kraton of Yogyakarta has its land and property acknowledged by the state, while the kraton of Surakarta has its land and properties appropriated by the state, except the palace and some of its noble houses. The description above shows that there is a difference in power levels between both kratons. This thesis examines the background process of power, particularly those related to architecture and the built environment including arts, rituals, and culture integrated with them. Based on Bourdieu’s theory of structure/agency, I focused myself on the silent ideology of the built environment, which embodies a power structure in people’s unconsciousness through experience, in order to find out why differences in power levels occurred in two places that share a similar history and physical layouts. Using a comparative analysis, I examine in detail the silent ideology in terms of landscape, in both urban and architectural context. This silent ideology, with the support of cosmological narratives and colonial discourses, together with the accumulation of history in each of them, has a determining role in reproducing the existing power structure and continuous effort as this silent ideology helps to make sure that the existing power structures last.

My thesis concerns how architecture can actively participate in processes of community-formation without reducing its creative processes to the oppositional tensions, prejudices and instrumentality of conventional left/right or bottom-up/top-down politics, “two poles of the same governmental machine.” By elaborating the architect as craftsman-author, my thesis explores Community and processes of political and poetic Representation. It is critical towards the biopolitics of governance. Theorisation is drawn principally from the political philosophy of critical theory, phenomenology and hermeneutics. My thesis promotes the architecture of “unavowable community.” Rather than forming communities by grouping likenesses together, and architecture forming their limits to either secure self-sufficiency or protect against insufficiency, architecture is tasked with finding methodologies for delimiting community-formation based on affirmative views of incompleteness and insufficiency. It is arranged in three Sections: Section I sets out the political and representational ground from which the investigation into community begins – it is a brief investigation into historical processes of forming community; Section II sets out possibilities for rethinking community – it is an investigation that shifts questions of craftsmanship, authorship, politics and representation from the search for appropriate community form to processes for becoming community; Section III is an investigation into the processes of craftsmanship and authorship directed towards the unpredictable but nonetheless “coming community” – it sets out a methodology for how an architect might go about proposing community.

On the eve of the twentieth century, the dismembering of old empires brought the formation of many new nation states, therefore of emerging new capitals. Becoming independent in 1912, Albania chose its definitive capital, Tirana, in 1920. Since then, the city has been a showcase of planning and architectural interventions for various regimes that have come in power, and its centre was and still is seen as a possibility to show the political ideals of each. The aim of this study is to examine how this important part of the city was produced, used and transformed in a timespan starting from 1920 until the fall of the People&#039 / s Socialist Republic in 1991. The spatial analysis of the city&#039 / s centre and the description of the relations between the main actors of these processes will help us understand the underlying goals for which these representative spaces were designed. On the other hand, comparing its urban elements with those of several coetaneous capitals will locate Tirana among the important planning examples of the time.

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / Architecture and political power have related throughout history in various ways. The most prominent function of architecture, as well as other aesthetics, in the political realm has been to raise the national sentiment of a people. The aesthetics of architecture can be used to sell the ideas of a political system to the populace both by the creation of new architecture and the destruction of symbols contrary to the polity. The vehicle by which politics and architecture interrelate is shown to be the rhetoric surrounding the buildings. Exemplary of this is the nationalist period of Europe, when characters such as Stalin and Hitler manipulated aesthetics to develop national sentiment. Hence, in newly democratic Prague and Berlin we see a change in architecture and a rhetorical debate on the national value of styles, though the styles used in each case were not the same. Architectural style is therefore shown not to reflect a specific political theory, and national sentiment is again the key way in which architecture and politics relate. / Major, United States Army