Author(s): F. Demet AYKAL D. Türkan KEJANLI Meltem ERBAÅ
Ever since the early times, human have been in constant effort to communicate and have conveyed their thoughts to each other by using various methods. These thoughts have been tried to be expressed sometimes with the pictures drawn on the walls, sometimes with some movements, sometimes with some voices, mimics and behaviours. As in other areas, communication has become a topic in the architecture also. For example, wood, which has cosmic meanings with soil, is one of the oldest materials of the earth. Columns that kept the temples standing in the past periods were made with this material and it is desired to convey a cosmic meaning with this material in the architecture. Yet the stone-age and cornelian obelisks were planted to point to the mountains that symbolized the central idea, temples, palaces, and cities on a larger scale were the symbols of the earth's center. Throughout the history, cities have been developed by their own potential or by an invasive power of administration and direction. Mardin's traditional urban texture has a historical background and is housed many civilizations. Mardin, which develops in this frame of social and cultural interaction and at the same time shaped according to the topographical structure of the land, has come to today with the traces of civilizations. Every civilization has brought some architectural structures to the city that express lifestyles, that they were also espressed as their communication elements. These architectural constructions came to symbolize the urban dimension and began to be referred to as the city icon. In this study, it was evaluated whether Ulu Mosque, Kas?miye, Sehidiye and Zinciriye medresses and Deyrul Zafaran Church are city icons or not with the consensus of user sense, in the trasitional city texture of Mardin. Due to this problem, 250 students from the Faculty of Architecture of Dicle University, were asked questions about the perception of these buildings in the whole city. The evaluations were made using adjective pairs and which building is an icon for the city is determined by the adjective definitions. As a result, the cities that continue to be the same every day, some suggestions for being original with an icon are presented.
The Journal of International Social Research received 7760 citations as per Google Scholar report
