Reading Architectural Modernization through Novel Characters: Kiralık Konak by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu

Architecture benefits from different disciplines and the interdisciplinary impact of architecture is a field that gets stronger over time. It intertwines with a wide range of disciplines, such as engineering, sociology, philosophy, and literature, that expand architecture’s own meaning. Language is a resource for disciplines to establish a relationship. Literary texts, which provide information about human-space relations, daily life, social themes, and problems, can be analysed through language to improve the scope and content of architecture. This study reads the constructed literary spaces that reflect social issues and changes through one kind of literary text, the novel, to interpret the changing effects of space with social issues on different characters. Specifically, it considers 19th-century social issues, such as social conflict and alienation due to modernism, on space and characters in Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu’s first novel, Kiralık Konak (Mansion for Rent), 1922. This paper presents the different physical and sensory experiences of the novel’s characters through the concept of space by making an architectural reading of literary text writing. This analysis makes it possible to deduce that architecture and literature inspire and influence each other. In addition, it is possible to discuss constructed literary space from a different perspective through this study, supposing the necessity of benefiting from the literature in architectural research. Thus, the relationship between architecture and literature is examined through the concept of spatiality in the novel to reveal perceptions as well as experiences of different characters.