METHODOLOGICAL SIMILARITIES AND DISJUNCTIONS IN SİNAN’S NARRATIVES: A COMPARISON ESSAY ON FOUR SOURCES

Abstract

Searches on Sinan have a considerable area in literature of Turkish architectural history. Due to the identification between Architect Sinan and Classical Ottoman Era, investigations on Sinan are always primarily subject matter. On the other hand, methodologies relevant to studies of Sinan and his era is also to present some important historical perspectives. In this paper, a comparison between two architects and two architectural historians who studied Sinan and his architecture is done by both their methodologies and narrative forms of Sinan. Ernst Egli and Turgut Cansever who are important actors as architects in Republican Era and also known as researcher in Turkish architectural history are scrutinized by their analyzes of Sinan’s architecture in the context of architectural production through theoretical connections, and it is questioned that what kind of contextual milieu shaped their approaches of Sinan and his architecture. It is also evaluated that how approaches of Doğan Kuban and Gülru Necipoğlu who known with Sinan studies specific to architectural history are influenced by Sinan’s biography or temporal variable of Sinan’s envisagement which displays permeability and variability. Thus, Sinan’s narrative is scrutinized and compared in terms of methodological similarities and disjunctions between Egli and Cansever as two architects and Kuban and Necipoğlu as two architectural historians. In addition to this, it is discussed that what kind of route is pursued by searches on implicit classical foundations of Ottoman architecture by the way of Sinan’s architecture from the beginning of early modernism to the 1970s, and permeability of formal language of Sinan readings is also argued. Consequently, this paper is dealt with approaches which focused on both foundation of historical narrative and contextualization of Sinan narratives in our architectural culture.