Inhabiting The Narrative Territory of Architecture

Date

2025-8-27

Author

Özcivanoğlu, Sonat

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This thesis adopts a diagnostic stance toward contemporary architectural practice, critiquing how architectural theory has shifted away from prioritizing the human condition and activities of inhabitation toward a managerial mode. It proposes the two acts inherent to human beings, narration and building, as acts of making sense. Narration restores a human dimension to time, while architecture makes space inhabitable. The thesis highlights a unique parallelism between narrativeness and architecture, as well as the acts of narration and building, discernible by identifying the conditions that define narrativeness. Criteria delineating the indisputability of narrative can be correlated with conditions intrinsic to architectural practice, among which the search for meaning in relations between events and bodies can be denoted as the fundamental precondition. Another perspective of this parallelism follows Ricoeur’s conceptualization of narration as mimetic activity in Time and Narrative. The thesis situates architectural practice and theory within a narrative territory, grounded in the Aristotelian mimesis/muthos pair, Ricoeur’s reading of muthos as emplotment forms the core of the parallelism (understanding architectural design as emplotment, a configurative act), and his conceptualization of ‘threefold mimesis’ (prefiguration–configuration–refiguration) provides the theoretical framework. The thesis proposes defining architectural acts as mimetic activities encompassing not only the configurative acts of architectural design in discussion, but also considering inhabitation and building activities. Within this understanding, architectural design acts become a meditation between preconceptions regarding inhabitation and its refiguration, an act of making sense of inhabitation through building.

Subject Keywords

Narrativeness, Mimesis/Muthos, Emplotment, Ethos, Configuration

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/116040

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis