Learning from Experience in Architecture: Fathy, Correa, Cansever

Guliz Ozorhon, Ilker Ozorhon
2016 International Review of Social Sciences and Humanities   unpublished
This article investigates how to benefit from vernacular architectural knowledge in the future. The method employed in this study was to examine architects who successfully made use of vernacular architectural knowledge and their effectiveness. For this analysis, three architects (Hasan Fathy, Charles Correa and Turgut Cansever) were selected. These architects made attempts to expose their vernacular architectural knowledge through identifications, observations and publications and put their
more » ... wledge of architecture-in particular philosophically-in the centre of their understanding of architecture. This article analyses these three architects' methods of utilisation concerning "traditional" and "vernacular" architecture and their interpretation and use. The article adopted two interrelated routes in order to analyse this. The first is the examination of their discourses/philosophies and the second is the examination of their architectural products that were motivated by or benefitted from these discourses. In the end, the study presents the similarities or differences of these architects on both discourse and practice levels in the context of vernacular architecture and in an integrated framework. It was found that they all put humans in the centre of their discourse and emphasized the importance/power of the culturally specific against the imitation-duplication and lost identity of architecture. In their architectural designs, they evaluated location-specific climatic and topographic properties as the main criteria and maintained spatial and structural continuity in traditional architecture.
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