"Ghosts of past reentering the stage": the transient attributes of Izmir’s persistent objects
Ozguner, Artun (2022) "Ghosts of past reentering the stage": the transient attributes of Izmir’s persistent objects. In: Design History Society Annual Conference, 2022, Design and Transience, 8-10 September 2022, Izmir Institute of Technology, Izmir, Turkey. (Unpublished)
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100 years after the great fire of Izmir, idealised narratives of a “Paradise Lost” (Milton Giles, 2008) hardly provide a complete picture of Ottoman Izmir. For design historians, Smyrna is telltale through its surviving material heritage. What can the transient attributes of Izmir’s persistent objects tells us about the city’s former and contemporary design rhetoric? To unpack this, the study focuses on a particular architectural fitting; a cast iron bracket supporting a vernacular architectural element, the oriel (cumba). The bracket is ubiquitous in Southwestern Turkish cities and in Northern Greek islands, particularly associated with late nineteenth-century modern houses of Rum (from Romanoi, referring to the Greek Orthodox communities of the empire) neighborhoods.
As a designed object, mediating Orthodox Greek identity in the highly segregated urban fabric of Ottoman built environment, it is worth visiting this design rhetoric in the 200th anniversary of the Greek revolution and 100 years after the great fire of Izmir. Following the enslavement and domination rhetoric of Greek nationalism, the bracket may as well be an enslaved Greek cultural artefact that lives in captivity in the host society, the Turkish nation-state. Indeed, as Igor Kopytoff (1986) argues, mass-produced commodities are like slaves placed forcefully out of context without their consent; yet, often the experience of the slave in the new context is overlooked. Similarly, a commodity might assume subsequent transient life cycles that shape its biography.
Indeed, the bracket and the oriel have recently been enjoying a revival in Turkey’s design rhetoric; replicated in contemporary formulations of vernacular architecture, or reproduced as mass-mediated graphic elements on branding works and souvenir paraphernalia. This local vernacularism with Izmir at its centre connotes ideas of leisure, escapism and a connection with Mediterranean universalism in contrast with Turkey’s rising authoritarian cultural politics, as the study will demonstrate.
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