Architecture Taking Shape Between Nature and Culture: The Primitive Hut as a Man-Made Creation
Architecture Between Nature and Culture
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14744/tasarimkuram.2022.71463Keywords:
Nature, culture, mimesis, primitive hut, origin, architectureAbstract
Abstract Architecture’s bounds with nature are represented as a complex process in a perverse cycle in the linear history of architecture and the process is intertwined with human actions, resulting in the built environment. Architecture tries to legitimize itself by incorporating culture to control and spatialize over nature in the socio-cultural dimension. This study aims to analyse architecture as remain in-between nature and culture by problematizing and questioning nature/culture dualism in the context of mimesis. In this way, this research focuses on the statements on mimesis and concerns that mimesis is a natural phenomenon and an artificial invention impacting architecture related to manners and customs collected under the cultural context. The mediating role of culture over nature is traced from the primitive hut which represents the cultural re-evaluation of nature in the most primitive level of architecture and the origins of architecture. The study traces the precedents of the primitive hut from the antiquity at first dwelling house by Vitruvius and other evolving figures as rustic cabin and primordial dwelling by the explicit viewpoints of Marc-Antoine Laugier and Jean Nicolas Louis Durand in the 18th century, and Gottfried Semper in the 19th century. Then this study finds out the paradigm shift on the nature-culture doctrine through rethinking evolving architectural practice until today by regarding nature as a sort of object to be manipulated and exploited as a different ontological reality under the cultural re-evaluation of the nature. In a further investigation, it has resulted that; primitive hut as a typical model is an output of culture with its bounded codes in balance with nature as a result of its evaluation of a critical object through enlightening the mimesis by the architectural existence and literary efforts.