Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
IGI Publishers (ADA group-formerly), Pennsylvania, 2022
Cultures form in long-lasting processes that combine human capabilities and life experiences and shape
our interactions on everything ranging from artistic expression to moral values. This collection of global
perspectives is inspired by Clifford Gertz’s affirmation that culture as a mechanism is rooted in our systems
of learning and thinking, never set in stone but constantly being created and re-created during the course
of our social relationships. This being all too evident when people from different civilizations have come
into contact with each other in various ways over time. Researchers work with this evidence to reveal the
ways ideas and cultural assets have influenced each other. Their efforts enable us to more readily identify
and reinterpret cultural myths and decipher indirect encounters such as the appearance of Mudéjar art in
Mexico, which informs our understanding as to how these influences were brought to the Americas by
Spanish colonists, even though the historical record might suggest that by this time Islamic communities
and cultural practices had been purged from the Iberian Peninsula. Implicit conveyors of cultural influences
were not limited to chance encounters between contemporaries; but brought as memories as well.
That cultural fusion, acculturation and syncretism include such forces helps the researcher to reveal their
role in emergent cultures, and how social interactions be they financial, political, or personal in nature
can mature to form artistic mechanisms that go on to shape material cultures in particular.
Cultural studies must therefore deploy multidisciplinary approaches to broaden our understanding
of material forms and the significance of their use in society. While cultures are often associated with
languages, beliefs, ethnicities, and lifestyles, their most influential encounters have often occurred in
times of conflict, somehow unleashing forces that empowered the artistic realm to brush aside ideological
and political schisms and share useful aspects of material culture. This is particularly observable in
the fields of art and architecture whose practitioners operate according to earned and filtered cultural
codes that essentially enable them to communicate their search for and adoption of new forms that appear
logical. In sharing material cultures former lessons are learned, new solutions produced and specific
transcultural communication skills are secured in the social and artistic sphere.
Cultural confrontations tend to evoke cultural symbiosis and influence the built environment strongly,
their meeting shaping the aesthetic sensitiveness of societies that we can observe in the solid and abstract
cultural products that contour their built environment. Societal processes of acculturation have
accompanied decisive shifts in the balance of power throughout history in the geographies they take
place, facilitating transfer of refined cultural knowledge and moulding what is remembered materially.
Evidence of culture in society could be considered as a text which offers a variety of readings of the past.
Each narrative speaks for distinct social values and reveals stylistic differences and interpretations of the
material evidence. In Dr Shackel’s analysis of the Negotiating the Memory of the American Civil War we
encounter two narratives of the same conflict told in ways that aim to shape the present and the future.
While both promote commemorative behaviors and inspired the erection of numerous monuments to
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Preface
host such eve, the author warns that diverse cultural groups can nourish different meanings of the past.
In this case one seeking to build an American nation, the other to counter this notion by conflating the
struggle with notions of white supremacy and sedition which fuel tensions at commemorations.
Communities that experience significant change often witness the emergence of social dichotomies as
in the example of the changing fortunes of two neighboring towns in Turkey that can be traced spatially
in the built environment. Safranbolu, long a prominent trading center on the Silk road with a reputation
for leather making, later experienced a rolling series of trauma and depopulation that would blight its
prospects throughout the 20th century. The experience of Karabük, only 8km away by the railway is
that of the rise of an industrial center whose modern configuration produced an epic social and urban
dilemma that still resonates today. Dr. Altinoz in her chapter on Confrontation of Traditional and Modern:
Case Studies on Republican City Karabük and Traditional Ottoman Town Safranbolu in Turkey
suggests that the modernizing ambitions of successive governments created cultural encounter ground
between modern and traditional groups. Regional dilemmas divided society and created lasting cultural
dissonance whose effect reached to counterpose traditional and modern settings and by so doing, the
attitudes of urban populations. Their arguments framed the emergence of social tensions that remain
culturally influential today, despite Safranbolu’s resurgence as a venue for Ottoman heritage tourism and
Karabuk’s relative decline and loss of its pioneering architectural and industrial legacy.
Multi-cultural societies and their dynamics concerning tolerance are then explored in Dr. Conrad’s
intriguing chapter Tropes of Transculturality: On Comparing Medieval Sicily and Castile. In revisiting
the multicultural structures of two Mediterranean civilizations the author tries to understand the
transcultural situation of Castile and Sicily through an analysis of comparative history where the author
sheds light on multicultural environments and how and why they produced ‘pragmatic tolerance’. He
draws our attention to the issue of tolerance whose features were different from modern connotations.
In his reading the romantic attitudes of the Convivencia were displaced by the pragmatic, politicized
ones of a dynastic regime.
Colonialism as a harsh way of cultural encounter generates tensions and activates many cultural phenomena
such as acculturation, exploitation, assimilation and associated cultural issues. Massive cultural
shift reflect changes seen in society and the built environment as witnessed in Colonial Encounters in
Space: Passage of the Great Sacred Center in Mexico City. Here Dr. Altinoz describes how space responded
to these colonial behaviors and helps us to know why the cultures of the Aztecs and New Spain
insisted on using the same public spaces. The author documents her attempt to answer these questions
by reading such space as a social and political text. In this way a huge city square turns into material
evidence of cultural passage from Aztec to Independence period Mexico.
Another colonial reading introduces cultural resistance. Dr. Muhammad Ommar brings to light how
Hausa people responded to defend their culture from an assimilation mode of colonial confrontation. In
his chapter, Bikin Magaji: Effect of Colonialism on Hausaland Arts 1905-1960. The author found strong
features of Hausa culture that enabled this society to ignore the supposedly superior British colonial
one while accommodating structural changes in the economy and society. Hausa society rejects British
identity through an internal mechanism of its own culture materialized through the careless attitude of
Hausa people to western modes in architecture.
Orientalism, another well-known facet of cultural meeting, features in a chapter where ornaments
were used as means of communication. Ornaments as Means of Communication – the Dresden Damascus
Room and the Study of the Villa Hohenhof by Dr. Ruppio studies a villa built for the German art patron
Karl Ernst Osthaus. This case study supplies acknowledgement of orientalism and its transculturation
process in a modern building. Here orientalism appears as a later addition but differs from typical examples
of the period and becomes a search for a new artistic style rather than a simple fantasy. Profound
knowledge and personal experience with Islamic ornament and Damascene interiors of the patronage
differentiates this experiment. The chapter aims to explain why Osthaus had his house redesigned and
how impulses from Islamic ornamentation and the world art collection at his museum – the Folkwang
– were tied to this process.
Travel, immigration as a history open the way for cultural interaction. Through the immigrant history
of an expressionist architect, the leading German architect Bruno Taut, a striking example is presented
of another essential story of cultural confrontation. In the chapter Bruno Taut’s Colors in Architecture:
Arts and Nature, Dr. Ninagawa presents after world war an immigrant story of an architect. Ideas also
travelled in this journey of his expressionist notions nourished by color that Taut sought to integrate with
Japanese culture. However, Taut’s Japan years and his encounter with the Japanese built environment,
brought him to review his expectations and color theory. Japanese modernist supporters wanted Taut to
be introduced as a modernist although he had been an expressionist with colors rather than a white-cube
modernist. Due to this gap, he only realized a few buildings in Japan. Modernist expectations and his
color preferences led him to focus on color-sensitive observations surrounding Japanese architecture. This
chapter shows how careful observation of vernacular Japanese architecture with its emphasis on bringing
natural light into its interiors led to artistic reformulation. Taut’s encounter with Japanese culture and
built environment formed his color conception and integrated color theories with climate and geography.
Cultural encounters can also be revealed from studies of cultural heritage sites even those where the
existence of neighboring cultures in the past produced a cross-cultural heritage. The chapter Architectural
Heritage of Greek Community Lived in Bartın, Turkey demonstrates the selection of evidence for
a material culture of geographies. Dr. Çelikyay supplies important examples of how homes in a Greek
community were structured accompanied by detailed photographs and drawings, and relates how this
architecture continues to serve the urban identity of the city of Bartın. The author’s work denotes the
peaceful coexistence of social groups over a mere century of Greek minority presence before they were
once again subject to forced migration. Çelikyay’s research has uncovered a body of material evidence
that contradict politically motivated decisions which ignore the protection of Turkey’s cultural environment.
Her study reminds of the importance of convention to the preservation of world’s cultural and
natural heritage sites in ways which materially sustain the cultural outcomes of the past.
The interactions and relationships between different cultures and lifestyles is also showed in the
study by Dr. Çakıcı Alp of Interaction Between Missionary Schools and Ottoman Housing Architecture
in Bursa, Turkey: Reflections of Cultural Tolerance on Architecture. The opening of foreign schools in
various parts of the Ottoman State in the 19th -20th century hold missionary features that became part
of the architectural heritage through interactions between different cultural ideas and traditions in the
established neighborhoods of a prominent Ottoman city. Here important evidence of the architectural
features of the missionary schools is evaluated in relation to material evidence of its contemporary impact
on Bursa’s residential urban architecture.
Cultural confrontations offer a multi-layered historical reading that can be developed as a concept
of patronage traveling to other cultures by means such as trade, war and migration. The Encounter of
b and Anatolia over Baba Nakkaş Style Tiles and the Reflections of the Style Today. Here Dr. Göktaş
Kaya introduces Baba Nakkaş, an artist of Uzbek origin who migrated from the Khorasan region in the
northeast of Iran and settled in Istanbul after Fatih Sultan Mehmed conquered Istanbul. This cultural
encounter of a master with courtly art activated an interaction of cultural exchange and development
as Nakkas interpreted and created linkage between Timurid style and Ottoman art. Thus, Iranian and
Anatolian synthesis brought syncritic approaches to the artistic atmosphere of the court. Through such
examination we more fully appreciate how the ethics that Nakkas derived remain influential to this day.
Another immigration history is shared by Dr. Yaşdağ’s chapter How two became one: Greek and
Muslim history of Alaçam Houses which brings to light massive human movements. This traces the
impacts of compulsory population exchange and how they nourished a heterodox structure to the built
environment. Further, information is provided about how Orthodox Greeks of Turkish nationality and
Moslems of Greek nationality used each other’s houses, the changes depending on their use by both communities
and their present condition. The author tries to establish an association between the traditional
domestic architecture we see in the Black Sea Region and a “history of exchange”. The author describes
the layout plan, construction materials and façade characteristics of the buildings accompanied by the
historical background related to the pre- and post-population exchange period of the township of Alaçam.
The coexistence of neighboring cultures can be evidenced by the dynamics of their cultural borrowings
which determine the degree to which codes are adopted or resisted according to the conditions of
their receivers and transmitters. Dr İşler’s example studies a cultural borrowing mechanism from the
Middle Ages in A Survey on Georgian and Byzantine Architecture and Their Cultural Encounters. İşler
reads the artistic situations of neighboring cultures from their own political, religious, economic and
artistic perspectives. The study proposes an original method of revealing the existence of similarities
and differences in the context of Byzantine and Armenian arts and how the same method shows cultural
resistance in Georgia.
Living side by side, coexistence, which activate cultural borrowings also appears in Telli’s An
Overview of Muqarnas in Armenian Architecture in the Context of Cultural Interaction a popular form
of ornamental decoration favored during the Middle Ages. The author investigates Armenian art and
follows traces of muqarnas in neighboring cultures. This compilation study reveals a cultural borrowing
mechanism in specific detail that also offers a collective perspective on this important the theme.
This book aims to be accessible to creatives, researchers and anyone seeking to refine their cultural
and artistic perspectives and to show cultural assets are more mobile than ideologies across boundaries.
Each contribution shows how a cultural force arose and how material evidence can be used to trace
artistic responses across different geographies and timelines. Each flag an empirical moment, one in
which an adaptive, psychological vision was triggered by the inevitable appreciation of something in one
culture by the practitioner of another. Together they read as a wakeup call, we hope will serve to improve
today’s level of tolerance. Though, the motive behind production differs in each case, this book aims
to discover these intentions and connections while taking into account constant time. What follows are
comprehensive examples from field studies which provide general and versatile information regarding
the themes in this specific area.