Assembling the radical: Counter practices of Florentine and METU architecture students in the mid-to-late 1960s

Date

2025-8

Author

Yerlikaya, Batuhan

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This thesis is a transnational historical inquiry into the counter practices of architecture students from the Faculties of Architecture in Florence and METU against the prevalent architectural culture, pedagogical traditions, and sociopolitical climate of the 1960s. It examines the critical actions of the student groups in two different schools and geographies during the second half of the decade, when nonconformist architectural and social movements culminated all around the globe. Within this framework, it offers a close reading of how the Florentine and METU architecture students articulated their multifaceted radicalisms within the era’s student movements through collective and creative tangible outputs. Extending from subversive architectural projects, physical models, and spatial arrangements to political posters, collages, short films, and performances with objects, this study explores the students’ wide repertoire of radical responses to the status quo in multimedia forms. In doing so, it foregrounds the manifold processes in which students of both faculties imaginatively assembled different materials, objects, visuals, and texts to obtain dissenting hybrid compositions as distinct types of assembly/assemblage. Ultimately, taking the Florentine and METU contexts as two idiosyncratic examples of granular stories, this thesis aims to demonstrate how architecture students globally went beyond traditional protest models of the mid-to-late 1960s and physically expressed their dissent by creating the most collaborative, inventive, and critical forms of production within the period’s youth movements.

Subject Keywords

to assemble, radicalism, student movements, Florence Faculty of Architecture, METU Faculty of Architecture

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/115546

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis