İnci Basa

Environmental discourse of architecture

This study attempts to examine the environmental discourse of architecture. The attempt to constitute a linguistic framework for the environmental discourse requires a critical understanding of the interrelationship among the following concerns: a) discourse as a ‘system of statements’ that prescribes the ‘theoretical formation’ of an object, b) architecture as a field in which several discourses (professional, technological, social, representational, theoretical, etc.) operate around their specific objects, c) environmental discourse as a discursive ‘formation’ which involves verbal or non‐verbal ‘statements’ referring to the problematic of environment. The analysis of the linguistic figures such as clichés, interpretations and definitions, reveals the discursive power of language as a condition in which environmental discourse forms its discursive objects and produces discursive effects in architecture.

Project Selection in the Design Studio: Absence of Learning Environments.

Abstract Project selection is an essential matter of design teaching. Based on observations of a specific curriculum, the author claims that a wide repertoire of subjects including offices, restaurants, hotels, and other public places are used to prepare design students, but that schools and other “learning environments/ schools” are similarly ignored. Considering this, the study unfolds reasons why interior design studios do not assign “learning environments” as design projects. Moreover, it analyzes a specific learning environment, in terms of its considerable scope and adequate complexity, as a design problem.

From Praise to Condemnation Ottoman Revivalism and the Production of Space in Early Republican Ankara

This article observes how architectural practice and symbolic appropriations interconnectedly produced space in 1920s’ Ankara, the new capital of the new Republic of Turkey. The once magnificent and powerful Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire, had its centuries long authority removed to disassociate the country from corporeal memories of its Ottoman past. The old capital was associated both with imperial and Islamic characteristics, and the republicans aimed to build a capital that spatially represented modernity. Interestingly, however, they employed Ottoman Revivalism, the architectural style in vogue at the time, to embody the political power of the new republic. This article emphasizes the contradiction between the “retrospective” politics of Ottoman Revivalism and the “modernist” vision of the republicans. It explores the sudden collapse of the revivalist approach by tracing the trajectory of modernist discourse as it was influenced by the political dynamics of the time.

The role of the train station in the image formation of the early republican Ankara

Depending on the assumption that buildings play the fundamental role in the formation of cities and their image, this study investigates the contribution of the Train Station to the formation of Ankara and its image in the early years of the Turkish Republic. The spatial entity of the station reflected the intended modern identity of the new state. Orienting the movement and development within its setting, the building constituted an indispensable element of the structure of the city. It acted as an immediate stimulus for the perception of the city and as a mediator for the creation of city’s image. As a building of prestige, it accommodated contemporary practices and provided civilized conditions for the whole public. Consequently, the station had a significant effect on the social and spatial formation and mental re-formation of Ankara.

Producing Representational Spaces for the Republican Memory in Samsun, Turkey

This article explores the spatialization of a collective memory in Turkey’s north coast city of Samsun. In 1919, Mustafa Kemal Pasa’s first step onto the Bandirma, the steamer that carried him from the Ottoman capital of Istanbul to Samsun, was also the first step of the Turkish struggle for independence. The dock that led him to the city and the hotel that accommodated him were also thus slated to be narrated as representational spaces of Samsun in the future. Decades later, for securing Samsun’s historic role in Turkey’s independence, the by-then abandoned Mantika Hotel, the dismantled Bandirma and the demolished Tobacco Dock were successively restored (1998), reconstructed (2001) and rebuilt (2009). Abstract spaces of the official historiography were physically produced in order to represent and remember. Within this context, the author scrutinizes the production of space in the particular case of Samsun and analyses it through Lefebvre’s theoretical framework.