Turkish Architecture - Essay Example

Turkish Architecture Before I start, it is important that I acknowledge the work and prior research of Hasan Khan in the field of Islamic Architecture. His work has certainly bee pivotal in shaping recourse for every scholar who has been connected to the field of architecture. Now, from the work of Hasan Khan, we have been able to determine that the main inspiration that drives the architecture in Turkey mainly derives its roots from the West; something which does not completely spring forward as a monumental surprise for anyone largely due to the fact that history communicates to us which is the presence of the Austrian Empire as the nearest neighbor to Turkey for the major part of two hundred and fifty years. Now, architecture is a field that encompasses and overlaps with many other fields of knowledge present in modern day world, therefore, it became increasing important for me to limit the scope of my paper to one specific type of architecture i.e. housing. In addition, the topic of assignment required me to de three buildings that represented the modernism era and three buildings that determined the postmodernism era; once again this task was not as simplistic as suggested by the wording of the task as there are many different notions as to what determined the strict divide between modernism and postmodernism eras in Turkey. Once again, for the benefit of my paper, I have decided to streamline the scope of my paper by earmarking the creation of the Republic of Turkey as the divide between the two eras which I look to compare over the course of my paper. It is important for the reader to note that, neither do I possess the professional expertise that any critical analyst of the field of architecture would enjoy and subsequently employ in response to a question such as the one I am tackling here, nor do I hold a boundless plethora of knowledge on the topics of architectural history which would certainly put a different shade to the argument at hand. In addition to this, and something which certainly sprung as a surprise to me, was the rather low number of extensive research that had been conducted on the urbanization and the following history in Turkey, therefore, the specific formulation of a frame of reference became somewhat of a stumbling block in the process of analyzing the question at hand. Therefore, the rationale and opinions that will be conducted in the rest of this paper will have a major contribution from the work of Hasan Khan but will eventually have to be attributed to my rather limited knowledge and understanding of field of Turkish architecture; which is why it would not completely dumbfound me if critics were to establish some errors in my judgment or were against my opinions with the feeling that my depiction and subsequent promulgation of Turkish architecture was not pertinently or pragmatically correct. (Pamir, 1982) Now, the city of Ankara sees its housing architecture being divided into three main sections. The first section is known in Turkey as the gecekondu, which is commonly known amongst people around the world. This type of housing architecture basically consists of a hybrid of an aboriginal city dialect and is indeed a marvelous site. Many architectural studies have already been conducted on their substance and form; however a very important thing to note in this setting is that these architectural buildings cannot be categorized as being slums, rather they are particular housing solution for the low income groups that are present not only in Ankara but in all of Turkey, as these houses have been seen in most of the other large cities in turkey as well. According to many statisticians, this type of housing once constitutes around sixty percent of the entire housing collection in Ankara; however, now this percentage is perceived to have shrunk to about thirty five to forty percent of the housing collection in the capital of Turkey. It must be noted here that the term housing collection refers to the total number of housing buildings that are present in Ankara at the time of writing and the statistics related to these housing collections do not determine the number of people of the entire population of Ankara that are housed in this type of housing. (Goodwin, 2003) The second type of housing of the postmodernism era is the large housing project. These types of housing projects are reminiscent of any other type of large housing schemes that are present in any other part of the world as they are formulated on the same pattern and are differentiated into two different sub-categories: high rise and low rise. Now, the large housing projects in Ankara are usually built for the middle income or sometimes the high income residents of the city and for the most part are high rise schemes. Here I would like to add that high rise buildings are tall structures with many floors built with the idea of housing a large number of residents in a small part of the entire land mass of the city. Also, according to rough measures, the term middle income in Turkey is usually defined as the income bracket of around five thousand five hundred to six thousand U.S. dollars per year. So, it is clear to see that the demarcation of Turkey as a third world country would be a rather unfair claim as by most third world country measures, Turkey would constitute an extremely wealthy state. The third type of building is what is known as an apartiman; which many claim is the word which has root correlation with the English word ‘apartment’, largely due to the shared nature of the definitions of these two words as the inference that any Turkish national derives from the word apartiman is a single independent building on a single assortment which has more than one living components and is owned by the group of people who reside inside this housing structure. According to statistics on this housing collection, an estimated fifty to sixty percent of the entirety of Ankara’s housing collection comprises of this type of housing and these statistics are higher for the other major urban centers in Turkey. These buildings are usually very simplistic and pastoral, but the main reason behind their existence is the not to provide an exciting avenue of housing for its resident but to fulfill the basic need of housing, and many consider that this type of housing is especially equipped to do a decent job of housing residents. Given all this, the history of this specific type of housing and the process of its development is very important and depicts many of the European and Western influences that have become part of the housing collection of Turkish residents in the post modernism world. Now, until the nineteen fifties, the basic process of procurement of housing rations for any person in Turkey would constitute the legal acquisition of a piece of land, taking into service an architect who would produce a design of the housing structure in accordance with the needs and wants of the owner of the piece of land and finally the employment of a housing builder of contractor for the purpose of bringing the architect’s design into existence. However, during the middle of the nineteen fifties, a new system of housing procurement came in fashion in Turkey. The name that this process was given was kat karsiligi, which is simple translation means ‘in return for a flat’. The basic idea was that the person or group of individuals who were the owners of a piece of land anywhere in the city would exchange this piece of land with a housing builder or contractor in response to the procurement of an apartment or any number of apartments for that matter; a number which was determined by value of the plot based on its size, its location and proximity to the urban hub of the city etc. However, the important aspect of this arrangement was that the apartments that were to be procured in exchange of the said piece of land would be from the housing building that was to be built on the traded plot of land. Usually, the builders of such a scheme of housing would not have a large scale of operations and would usually have a liquidity problem which is the main reason behind them selling the living units inside the building even before the building was complete, in order to finance the completion of the building. Therefore, it was usually seen hat by the time a housing building was actually completed, it would constitute around six or seven different owners in addition to the builder who built the housing scheme and the architect who designed it and this would become a joint venture for these said parties. These buildings were usually robust and pastoral and such schemes produced easily available and immediately useable housing spaces, even if the scale of these operations was extremely small and the process was time consuming as well. This process would be small enough for all the owners of the project to have a sizeable and withstanding vote on the matters of the project and the subsequent outcomes would depict a certain sense of cohesiveness amongst this group of owners. Size of these apartimans was not restricted to a certain genre, in fact they were prevalent in almost all manners of sizes and shaped. However, the smaller apartimans have not been able to stand the test of time and have fairly vanished from public view even if some are still present in the city at the current point in time: the medium to large sized ones are the ones which are present on common view these days in the city of Ankara. A rather interesting fact that was uncovered with regards to these buildings were that even those housing schemes that were built with the notion of housing low income people would have a rather striking look about them when viewed from the outside, despite the fact that the people that resided in these ‘striking’ apartments usually came from income brackets that were lower than even those of the people who lived in the illegal immigrant communities of the city. However, in a large number of circumstances, these housing collections would be simplistic and modest buildings with immensely low if no architectural complexity about them. It was interesting to note that the three types of housings that have been mentioned in this paper are often found juxtaposed in the city to the extent that a large housing project, a gecekondus and an apartiman can all be found side by side to each other in the capital of Turkey, to the extent that these three types is found to be juxtaposed to the president’s palace in Ankara. (Rice et al, 2005) Now, in order for us to look at the difference between the postmodernism and the modernism era and the sway that the European and Western models of housing may have enjoyed over the Turkish housing architectural landscape, it is extremely pertinent to look at a simple traditional Turkish house in the pre-modernism era; this exercise has an added value attached to it due to the fact that singular housing assortments have diminished in the modern landscape of housing collections and have been replaced by the collective units which have been described earlier. The Turkish urban house was a simple building with three typical elements; a prominent roof: an identifiable base; and a living section of one or two stones, the piana-nobile or whatever one wants to call it. Roofs in Turkey are almost sacrosanct: when roof construction begins, for example, a flag is raised as a token of respect. (Necipoğlu, 1995) It is clearly evident from the investigation that has been conducted that the Turkish architecture has certainly seen a face lift since the early days of housing collections and this certainly has to be attributed to the fact that the living styles and personalities of Turkish residents have changed in the post-modernism era, therefore, it was completely natural that their housing rations would also see a similar facelift as Turkey moved from the modernist to the post-modernism era. Bibliography: 1. Pamir, Mehmet Doruk. (1982). ‘Recent Design Trends in Turkey’. In Urban Housing. Margaret Bentley Sevcenko (ed). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. 2. Goodwin G., (2003) "A History of Ottoman Architecture"; Thames & Hudson Ltd., London; ISBN 0-500-27429-0 3. Rice, John Gordon; Robert Clifford Ostergren (2005). "The Europeans: A Geography of People, Culture, and Environment". The Professional geographer 57 (4). ISSN 0033-0124. 4. Necipoğlu, Gülru (1995). Muqarnas: An Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture. Volume 12. Leiden : E.J. Brill. p. 60. OCLC 33228759. Read More