Research Colloquium with Erdem Erten
On Wednesday, May 11, between 11:00 and 12:30, the third Research Colloquium of the Spring Semester 2022 will take place. Our Guest, Erdem Erten from Izmir Institute of Technology will present his recent research project. The title of the presentation is "The Vernacular vs the Global: A New Dynamic?". Following the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions and discuss.
The Research Colloquium will take place in a hybrid format, on campus at Salzufer 6, 10587 Berlin in Studio 1, and via Zoom.
Below are the details for joining via ZOOM.
Click here to join the Zoom Meeting.
Students across all disciplines are invited to participate in an interdisciplinary exchange. Be inspired and get to know new perspectives!
About the project: "The Vernacular vs the Global: A New Dynamic?"
By Erdem Erten
Today we experience a world where globalization transforms everything, everywhere at varying speeds and ways. Compared to the 1990s or earlier, when architectural discourse traveled the world much slower than it does today, the practice and the production of architecture are being pulled into diverse directions, or these directions are more visible than ever. For architectural historians, the dynamics of globalization reinforces the difficulty of defining an all-encompassing framework for the contemporary situation. “The center vs. the periphery” no longer applies to a digitized, well-connected “cyber-and-koolworld.” No longer equipped to deal with the colossal weight of architectures in disarray, it is as if architectural history and theory are cursed by “the global.”
Until the 1970s, architecture had been preoccupied with a historiographic dictum that separated architecture into “Architecture” vs. “architecture.” According to Nikolaus Pevsner, one of the most important architectural historians of modernism, “A bicycle shed is a building. Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal” (1942, p.23). Abandoned by architectural history’s interest and disguised as “anonymous,” since then, “vernacular” architecture has been Architecture’s other in a loose ahistorical grouping of “buildings.” Interestingly this separation proved helpful in supporting another binary opposition: the local versus the global, where the local, imprisoned in discourses of identity, is almost always something to be taken care of under the threat of the global.
How is, then, the local vs the global discussed by architects? How is the relationship between the two shaped? Showing the signs of a significant change in architecture, many architects in Turkey forgo this debate. They see no value in being involved in the identity masquerade. No longer interested in putting on a fake “localized” identity on their work, architects retreat/reposition themselves to a new kind of anonymity and produce a variety of vernaculars independent of the conservative definition of the “vernacular” of a place, of a region, etc.
About Erdem Erten
Erdem Erten graduated as an architect from the Middle East Technical University in Turkey and received his PhD from the History Theory Criticism program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. As an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at Izmir Institute of Technology in Turkey, he teaches undergraduate and graduate students in architectural design, architectural history and theory. His research interests include the theorization of culture and its impact on postwar modern architecture, architectural journalism, the problem of the avant-garde in architecture, romanticism and neo-romanticism, postmodernism, and architectural theory.