The edification of the citizen: The relationship between architecture, political representation and the making of the public realm

This dissertation will make explicit the plurality of ways that the architecture of the city edifies the citizen. It will explore the potential of edification as political representation, as part of an expanded definition of citizenship and of democratic discourse. This requires identifying the making of urban architecture as an action of political life and the edifice as a part of political discourse. It is an exploration of a universal human need to enter the public realm as a citizen and be represented there.; Citizenship has been classically defined as a product of political life, as a contract of living a life well with other humans. In the classical definitions of a political life, a citizen is represented by his political actions and speech within a public realm. Speech and action have been privileged in the representation of a citizen. Therefore, political representation is not in this context a form of artifice, the world of made objects. A conceptual rift exists between political form and artifice. Architecture cannot be examined as a form of political representation without first examining the nature of the conceptual rift that has evolved between political life and artifice. The concept of citizen has elements which may be normative in content and therefore proscriptive or culturally specific in nature.; At a conceptual level, people understand through connotation, metaphor and “common sense” that some forms of artifice have political meaning. However, a more explicit means by which architecture can be evaluated as political representation should be developed. Therefore, this dissertation develops a means by which architecture's ability to represent a citizen can be examined and evaluated. This dissertation suggests that such a means is possible through theory-building and visual analysis based on qualitative concepts that are shared by both political and architectural form.