Reproduction of form and the problem of originality in public buildings: Government mansions

Increasing historical references in today's Turkish public buildings revive the debates about public buildings and originality in architecture. In the thesis, the progress of historicism in Turkish public building design and its relationship with originality is monitored. The hypothesis of the study is based on an inverse correlation that originality decreases as historical references increase. In this study, government mansions were determined as samples inasmuch as they show continuity as a type of building from Ottoman modernization to today and the employer of projects is the state. The work carried out is important in terms of examining the transformation and originality in the architecture of the government mansions holistically. The historical boundaries of the study have been determined from 1923 to the present. In the theoretical part of the study, the kinds of historicism, reproduction forms that define the relationship of similarity between architectures, the concepts of copy, citation/hidden citation, collage/assemblage, parody-hyperbole, emulation, and architectural originality. The originality-historicity model, which is also the method of the thesis, is based on this theoretical discussion. The originality-historicity model, which is also the method of the thesis, is based on this discussion. The model examines structures in two dimensions, syntactically and semantically. The syntactic dimension considers every layer and architectural element that makes up the structure as a unit. The syntagmatic dimension works in three steps. In the first step, the structures are scored according to the parameters graded according to the similarity scale. The similarity scale is based on the concepts of reproduction forms and originality discussed in the theoretical part of the thesis. It is based on the hypothesis that as the similarity between the predecessor and successor architectures increases, the originality decreases. In the second step, the semantic dimension of the sequence is interpreted. During the development of the model, unstructured interviews and pilot studies were conducted with a group of professionals. The findings obtained in this study and the findings obtained as a result of the application of the model supported each other. The results of the model confirm the hypothesis. There is an inverse correlation between historical references and originality. However, when the variation between the originality values is examined, it has been observed that the structures obtained only after 2002 are at the lowest levels with a large rate. These years mark an important break in our architectural history. It is seen that structures with high originality value are designed by emulation and sometimes collage /assemblage, while structures with low originality value are seen to be designed by hand with citation / hidden citation, parody, and hyperbole, again with collage. Government mansions with high originality value reproduce a specific reference through a creative process. It has been observed that government mansions with low originality value refer to examples that have already emulated a period, rather than the architectures they refer to. These are imitations of imitation. In a country with a multi-layered history based on the synthesis of various civilizations, it is not undeniable that society finds it valuable to reference an identity in public architecture. However, the quality of the presented architectural style is very important for both architecture and public space. Although the Neo Ottoman-Seljuk architecture produces an identity, it cannot produce a unique value and does not create a culture that can be articulated to the architectural environment in the world. Keywords: Public buildings, government mansions, originality, reproduction of form, historicism.