The perceptual association of authority with the public and designers in the analysis of local government building facades

The political powers have formed an architectural language to demonstrate their ideologies, strengths, stabilities and their connection with the past to the public and have made this language visible in public structures. This study has the aim of emphasizing the preferences of the power on the samples of facades of the municipality buildings. The main hypothesis of this study is; the authoritarian and democratic regimes in order to demonstrate their own ideologies, the style they use on the facades of the municipality buildings within the framework of certain concepts is overlapping with the preferences of the layperson, but it differs with the designers. In this experimental study implemented with this purpose, the perceptual differences of the groups of the municipal administrators (41 persons), layperson (43 persons) and architects (40 persons) have been examined. The respondents have evaluated the concepts of 'general aesthetics', 'liking', 'power', 'familiarity', 'permanent', 'democrat', 'inviting' and examined in the context of 'warmness', 'publicness' and 'preference' in the facades of 40 different municipality buildings from different cultures with different styles. The findings of the study have been analysed by means of the SPSS programme. According to the results of the analysis; in the evaluation of general aesthetics and liking, it has been regarded that the directors of municipality and the layperson has concentrated on classical style whereas the architects have concentrated on contemporary buildings. In the facades of the municipality buildings, "power" and "permanent" have been related most with the components of arch-colon effect, explicitness of the entry, symmetry, rhythm and tower effect. The architects by reacting towards the postmodern buildings, have been diversified from the administrators of the municipalities and the lay persons. The facades with the classical style have been characterized as quite "public" in comparison with other facade images by each of the three respondent groups.