Printed architectures: architects’ auto-monographs in Turkey 1950s-1980s

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2016
Bancı, Selda
This dissertation examines architecture in Turkey from the 1950s to the 1980s through printed mediums and focuses on the auto-monographs prepared by practising architects, one of the genres of printed mediums in architecture. These books retrospectively display architects’ complete œuvre via images and texts and provide a place for architects to structure their own architectural production and to develop an understanding of architecture itself as a practice. The monographs live longer than the buildings and their architects by housing architectural practice for many years and thus providing a basis for architectural history and theory, and for the conceptualization of architecture itself in discursive terms. In the studies carried out so far, architectural historiography has usually focused on the building or its creator architect. On the other hand, this dissertation approaches architects’ auto-monographs and hence printed architectures both as research subject and research object, and subject-matter of its historiography. In this manner, focusing on the genesis of architects’ auto-monographs in Turkey, the dissertation attempts to reveal the issues hitherto untouched or undervalued, and addressed a shift in the cultural and historical context of architecture in the country. Each of the monographs examined in this study only generates meanings in relation to the others as a node in the network of the contemporary architectural context. Therefore, this dissertation tries to understand the roles of the monographs in the network through the concepts of “exhibition,” “archive” and “narrative” rather than to analyze them as individual cases. The three concepts, following a chronology from the 1950s to the 1980s, provide the ground to discuss how architects displayed architectural products, structured architectural production and understood architecture through their auto-monographs in their attempts to conceptualize their architectures and (re)produce them for public recognition; hence, these three concepts produce clues for similar analyses of contemporary and future cases.

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Citation Formats
S. Bancı, “Printed architectures: architects’ auto-monographs in Turkey 1950s-1980s,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2016.