The lack of context in the visual making of Istanbul: assessments and propositions for urban transformation

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1421140 (Table of Contents)

This study aims to investigate the rapid transformation of Istanbul with regard to its visual making and remaking in terms of aesthetic and intellectual practices since the westernization efforts are on stage. It discusses when and to what extent the changes in the urban landscape and everyday practices have corresponded with modern and postmodern principles. The hypothesis, depending on the famous assertion of Lyotard that "a work can become modern only if it is first postmodern," claims to question if the visual character of Istanbul could be construed as perpetually postmodern or not. Accordingly the western understanding of art and architecture in modern and postmodern terms, and the visual making of Istanbul in its urbanization experiences are held in detail. Since the standing point of this study considers both modernism and postmodernism, although they are defined in distinct aesthetic and intellectual categories, it generates a constructional continuity – or contextual coherence - in western epistemology: This thesis tries to bring about proposes of three vectorial faculties (3A) – authenticity, autonomy, and arbitrariness – which are suggested as being fundamentally inherent to the matter of contextual continuity among modernism and postmodernism. Authenticity covers the historical context within past-present-future in terms of reintroducing (and regenerating) the primitive and traditional elements of a culture. Autonomy is taken as being highly related with socio-economic and political motives in recognizing the self, identity in relation with everyday practices. Arbitrariness, for binding natural conditions and cultural judgments together with responding and corresponding to the former concepts are evaluated in respect to their constructional wholeness.