Turkish Wooden House Architecture

"House," the primary and most unique product of the relationship between space and human, has long transcended the boundaries of architecture and been embraced as an indicator of a broad disciplinary field. The "Turkish house," despite all its diversity and its coverage of a vast historical and geographical area, only became a subject of research from the 20th century onwards.

The Turkish housing tradition maintained its fundamental layout and the originality of its element placement for centuries. At the root of the room space lies the way of existence of nomadic traditions; life and form are intertwined. Enriched by the overlap of nomadic pragmatism and Islamic abstraction, this dwelling also reflects the local characteristics of the Anatolian-Turkish society. It reached its peak with the consolidation of Ottoman rule in the second half of the 16th century, finding its unique expression in the "hayatlı ev" (house with a courtyard/living area). Although the Turkish house has been described in travelogues, engravings, and paintings for five hundred years, the limited lifespan of its building materials, especially wood, has not left sufficient data to study this architecture in all its details.

With this book, which attempts to evaluate Turkish wooden residential architecture with comprehensive historical research and a deep theoretical approach, we hope it will achieve the position and value it deserves in universal architectural history.