ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the ways in which a professional quest of cultural autonomy generated various imaginations as a response to the cultural order of the nation-state. It examines the formation of a particular architectural culture through a discursive reading of some of the inaugural lectures delivered since the formation of the Indonesian school of architecture. The chapter demonstrates how issues raised in their representation of "professional identity" have not been sufficently understood as a cultural effort of the postcolonial Indonesian to construct a version of reality within which they are shaped. It shows the socio-economic bases of architectural thought in postcolonial Indonesia than to ask why the making of a place for architecture has been conceived in "national", rather than in other, forms. It provides an analysis from the perspective of the "Indonesian subject" even though this is all male, and from the particular "middle class" social background that enables them to become "architects".
