​FROM SEDAD ELDEM TO TURGUT CANSEVER, THE LEGACY OF A SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

Abstract

The theme of this proposal focuses on the concept of "transmissibility" of architectural knowledge unfolding within a School of Architecture. The aim is to highlight the principles that, by the transmission of thought from a Master to a Scholar, have contributed to the development of a Turkish Architecture School. In this specific example, I would like to analyse the influence of Sedad Eldem teaching method in the work of Turgut Cansever . The architecture of Turgut Cansever is morphologically distant from that of Sedad Eldem and draws on a very wide semantic repertoire, which cannot be reducible just to the influence of a School of Architecture. However, the experience in the Seminars on National Architectural Style and the academic and professional training with Sedad Eldem had a decisive role in the formulation of the theoretical thought of Turgut Cansever, and this influence is clearly legible in his works of architecture. Two transmission subjects, which played a central role in the formation of this idea of school, in particular can be outlined; namely the notions of "type" and "building process”. Eldem in his texts, as Türk evi o Yapı, has deployed a range of possible proposals about the types and the architectural elements. These were part of the same tradition, but at one time made possible the development of a new architecture. "Type" and "building process" are, in this idea of School, part of the same cultural legacy, based not on the imitation of models, but on valuable operating tools to work in the city. The type has to do with the transmissibility of the settlement and urban facts and is linked to the concept of identity. The very notion of identity admits the variation within a common formal repertoire, therefore the use of types in architecture allows a great operational freedom, in terms of architectural composition. Cansever resorts in his architecture both to the variation on the same type as in the Demir Village in Bodrum, where the architect works through the investigation of the local settlement types , and to the typological contamination as in the Turkish Historical Society building in Ankara . Even more evident in terms of teaching transmission from Eldem to Cansever is the conception of architecture as "building art". The character of the building process, in which standard elements are joined together to create a structurally and compositionally unitary system, is a feature widely developed in the work of Cansever. Thus the reasons that lead the type into a concluded form are above all constructive ones, while the settlement choices are closely linked to the site. In this sense the effectiveness of a teaching transmission can be evaluated not on the formal emulation, rejected several times by Eldem himself as a matter of fashion, but on the possibility of forming a critical ability, through a working method based on the study of the project in relation to the site, analysing case by case the possible success of the proposed solutions

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