Acculturation to the Ideals: Architectural Schools’ Magazines as Sites of DiscourseMaster’s Thesis
This thesis investigates the discursive construction of the image of the ideal architect within architectural school-based magazines. These magazines are entirely faculty-led, mainly
documenting the school’s news, events, and achievements in addition to the faculty members’
scholarship and students’ work. I focus on four magazines, crossing perspectives from different
discourses about architectural education. Informed by Foucault’s notion of discourse and Bourdieu’s
habitus, the thesis argues that these magazines are sites of discourse that consciously and
consistently hegemonize their affiliated schools’ discursive formations. It interprets the proximities
and divergences between each magazine’s ideological, and hence graphical dimensions, reflecting
on their socio-cultural systems. I employ semiotic discourse analysis to analyze the magazines’
linguistic and visual content and to identify the schools’ construction of the varying institutionalized
discourses of acculturating the students to the ideal architect, showing how the context’s inherent
social, cultural, and political structures inform architectural education. The schools’ curation of
hegemony becomes visible in the figuration of the ideal architect, which takes two forms: the
personified and the imaginary.