Adapted Design Language for Anatolian Vernacular Housing

Abstract

This paper aims to define an adapted contemporary design language for housing built next to vernacular residential buildings of Anatolian villages. The case has been selected from Balıkesir province in the North-western part of Anatolia within a corpus of 104 houses from selected 81 villages of the region. Originally, vernacular house plans consist of allocation of rooms around a hall: sofa. Each room is a core living space with everyday living needs for a family. House is formed with various spatial relations between sofa and rooms around it. This relation is the determinative feature in formation of vernacular language for each Anatolian house. The study has three phases: analysis, adaptation and generation. The first phase analyzes the elements of vernacular by decomposing its language into sub-parts. In the second phase, the inadequacies of existing vernacular structures were exposed with methods of observation and questionnaires applied on users and new demands for living have been adapted with vernacular existing language grammar rules. In the last phase within the framework of adapted language rules for Balıkesir vernacular, numerous novel design alternatives were generated. This study claims to sustain the existing socio-cultural spatial configuration by adapting newly built contemporary houses to actual vernacular architecture in the planning context.

Citation

Erem, Ö. and Ermiyagil, S.A. (2016), "Adapted Design Language for Anatolian Vernacular Housing", Open House International, Vol. 41 No. 1, pp. 51-58. https://doi.org/10.1108/OHI-01-2016-B0007