Vol. 12 No. 3 (2015): Space Syntax and Architectural Design
Articles

The reflection of religious diversity and socio-cultural meaning on the spatial configuration of Traditional Kayseri Houses

Özlem Atak
Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, Erciyes University, Kayseri, Turkey
Gülen Çağdaş
Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey

Published 2015-11-01

Keywords

  • Traditional Kayseri Houses,
  • Space syntax,
  • Visibility

How to Cite

Atak, Özlem, & Çağdaş, G. (2015). The reflection of religious diversity and socio-cultural meaning on the spatial configuration of Traditional Kayseri Houses. A|Z ITU JOURNAL OF THE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, 12(3), 249 - 265. Retrieved from https://www.az.itu.edu.tr/index.php/jfa/article/view/409

Abstract

Recent studies on domestic spaces have demonstrated that social meaning and cultural values are mostly reflected by means of spatial organizations of houses, thus, in that way, different cultures express themselves through different spatial models. In this respect, space syntax and visibility graph analyses arise as the computational approaches to discover the interactions between space and culture. These methods have essentially been constructed through the relationships of permeability based on movement and visibility based on the perception of a moving observer. In the examination of the entire house or it’s certain spaces in the context of introversion and extroversion, they are effective methods which are used to understand the privacy related to spaces, control mechanisms, the level of the internal relations of the household and the relations between the household and the visitors. In this study, domestic space was examined through twenty-seven traditional houses of Kayseri in Central Anatolia, Turkey, where people from different religious beliefs have lived for long years, within the contexts of space syntax and visibility graph analyses. The houses were analyzed by using the Depthmap-UCL software developed by Alasdair Turner. After the permeability and visibility analyses, the study focuses on how socio-cultural meanings are reflected on the spatial configuration of traditional Kayseri houses, what common and/or different characteristics are demonstrated by the houses in terms of the spatial configuration and visibility structure, and the importance of permeability and visibility structures in the spatial configuration of houses.