Towards an Architectural Bildung: A Model Glossary and an Operational Curation

Date

2025-8-29

Author

Sarıca, Sezin

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

208
views

0
downloads

Cite This

This thesis is grounded in the premise that architecture is knowledge production encompassing cultural, political, and material dimensions. Yet many concepts central to this understanding have been erased or misused in modern and postmodern debates, often remaining overlooked. Addressing this requires a renewed terminology that revisits neglected strands of architectural theory to reframe diverse approaches to architectural knowledge-making. Accordingly, the framework builds on the nineteenth-century shift from “being” to “becoming”, within which the German concept of Bildung, encompassing “formation”, “culture”, and “education”, is claimed as both a theoretical and operative lens. Despite its foundational role in nineteenth-century art and aesthetics, Bildung has remained underexplored in architectural discourse. Intellectual perspectives approached it as subjective, historical, natural, and pedagogical; defined architecturally, however, it can further enable critical re-evaluations of the concept. In this regard, the research advances two arguments. First, strands of architectural theory over the past two centuries reveal recurring “reflexive doubles” that mirror the conceptual framework of Bildung, offering a means to define it in architectural terms. The thesis constructs a model glossary around doubles such as “artform and coreform”, “scenographical and technological”, and “shape and form”. Second, the interplay of plural understandings of Bildung offers an operational framework for architecture, defining three categories of creative processes: Imitative Bildung, Formative Bildung, and Reflexive Bildung. Treating earlier theories as active sites for generating new connections, this thesis contributes to the evolving theory of making by reactivating forgotten strands of architectural theory and proposing an expandable set of operations.

Subject Keywords

Bildung, architectural knowledge, architectural making, imitation, formation, reflexivity

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/116115

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis