International Congress of Aesthetics 2007 "Aesthetics Bridging Cultures" Historical Traditional and Cultural Values are Commodified to Create an Identity: Preferences of Architects and Middle Income Consumers for Single Family Mass Housing Examples (original) (raw)

Since the 1980s through creating image dependent products, advertisement industry of housing in metropolitan towns of Turkey has been in the service of new kind of tastes through making collective identities promising "a different lifestyle". Either images in the forms of the past or images of different cultures have been constructed and offered to claim a better future in the social network of consumption. Some of the types, housing typologies and even some architectural terminologies have been consumed. The condition of house production, however are formed by the merchant builders, mostly with little involvement of architects. Most of the architects in housing business try to satisfy the state, private enterprises and the customer, as they behave according to their intents. Architects have almost no chance to design in their own preferences. In fact, it is the era of flexible accumulation and consumer society is ready to digest what will be offered to them. In the case no architectural identity claimed to the consumer, the ones which has some connections to the history or look different than what the people have would be most likely to be preferred. As a result, by different social classes of a society, historical, traditional and cultural values might be commodified in the name of creating an identity. In that context, the paper has focused on the interpreted image of the single family mass housing itself. As suggested in this paper, high income group members are not the only ones who are impressed through these images, but middle income consumers can also be influenced by the appearances some of which criticized by architects as collage, kitsch, etc. The paper presents the differences and similarities between the perceptions of the architects and the middle income consumer groups.