Environmental Discourse in Turkish Architecture

Abstract

Since the 1960s environmental discourse has entered into architectural theory and practice in effective ways, inducing disciplinary transitions in all three categories: artefacts, knowledge and practices. This dissertation emphasizes the discursive character of this “environmental turn” in architecture and aims to make explicit its significance for Turkey. To that end, the dissertation reviews four Turkish architectural periodicals covering a time span of 49 years from 1963 to 2012. The data is then used for tracing of the formation of the discourse on environmental architecture in Turkey by illustrating how certain concepts and themes arose at specific time periods and their transformations in time. In that context, the dissertation emphasizes three concepts – environment, sustainability and energy-efficiency- and in revisiting these in a sequential and overlapping fashion a general outlook of the conditions in which the discourse on environmental architecture have emerged is sketched. Such an analysis reveals the transformation of environmental considerations from that of radical reflections to legitimate concerns in Turkey. Yet, it also displays that this “legitimation” is based on an unquestioned “givenness” of the objects and statements of the discourse. This, in return, creates a speculative basis of legitimacy removing it from its social and economic contexts. This study has taken on this challenge by emphasizing the system of formulating the problems –namely the “problematic” of the discourse as its main concern. In that context, it first of all presents the analysis of the mechanisms in which environment has risen as an important problem of architecture in Turkey, and secondly, reveals the relations of this process to the nature of solutions proposed. In the end, by emphasizing the taken-for-granted assumptions and generalizations inherent in the discourse on environmental architecture in Turkey, the dissertation aims to open up for new avenues in which new formulization of the problems could emerge.