Studying contemporary mosque architecture necessitates dealing concurrently with both the past and the present. Burdens of the past cause a crisis at a point when architects attempt to design prayer spaces that avoid historicist references while attending to the religion’s liturgical requirements. This crisis indicates the moment at which architects are forced to become critical of what is preceding, and thus creates a challenging situation in the evolution of mosque architecture. This article takes the Sancaklar Mosque, designed by Emre Arolat Architecture (EAA), as its main object of research in order to assess this challenge. The Sancaklar Mosque presents a significant attempt to free mosque design from the prevailing formal practices observed in the majority of current mosques, by rejecting any clear reference to the historical mosque type and the use of any conventional mosque elements. However, I argue that while Sancaklar Mosque displays a clear break with the past, it is not ahistorical. The mosque suggests both a suspension of discussions on mosque architecture reduced to formal significations and historical prototypes, but also a different way of dealing with the past, which is, in this article, conceptualized as ‘defamiliarization’. The Sancaklar Mosque provides a significant example for a project in which familiar codified formal elements are displaced as a particular response to the challenge that architects face when designing religious buildings.
This study focuses on the problem of the reconstruction of urban space through discursive representations. Understanding how discourse is spatialised will provide a conceptual ground for the discussion of the problem. The evaluation of knowledge, power, and representation in spatial terms becomes the fundamental premise in the study. Urban space is the space where discursive representations have a social and spatial existence. Here, urban space is approached as an archival space that renders spatial-social-political information visible. The problem is studied in reference to the Sultanahmet district in Istanbul. The Sultanahmet district is an urban palimpset whose archival structure has been made through discursive representations, each constructed on the proceding one.
In this article, the author studies the local response to the nation-building process that constructs society, its space, and history, by focusing on the particular case of Greece in the nineteenth century. How local inhabitants actively participated in this process is discussed in the example of the Plaka district on the northern slope of the Athenian Acropolis. The author argues that mutual relations among modernization, Hellenization, and living tradition constructed modern Greece as a new nation in the nineteenth century. The official efforts toward Hellenization and modernization with the emphasis on classical antiquity gave rise to the emergence of alternative tendencies that were shaped by the local inhabitants according to the way they perceived society and experienced space. The author's focus in this article, then, turns to nineteenth-century houses in Plaka as a folk expression of the official neoclassical style to discuss the local performance in the construction of a national identity.Keywords urbanism and architecture in Greece, national identity, neoclassicism, nineteenth-century nation building in Greece, nineteenth-century houses in Plaka, AthensIn this article, I question how the local responds to the dominant processes that combine in the formation of a national identity, the society, and its space, and how it becomes both a part and a result of the nation-building process. This will entail an investigation of the processes embedded in the formation of a society and its history, and their reflections on spatial-architectural practices. In particular, I focus on the nation-building process undertaken in Greece in the nineteenth century and the active participation of its inhabitants in this process, as exemplified in the Plaka district on the northern slope of the Athenian Acropolis.Understanding the multiple processes that combine in the building of a society, its history, and space by drawing on the tools of architecture is significant in a discussion of local performance in the construction of a national identity; and architecture can be considered not only a at SETON HALL UNIV on April 4, 2015 juh.sagepub.com Downloaded from
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