A Study on the Texts of a Late Ottoman-Early Republican Intellectual: Celal Esad Arseven's Architecture Books

In this article, the books on architecture written by Celal Esad Arseven, who practiced in different disciplines such as architecture, history, culture, urbanism, municipality, urban history, art history and art techniques in the Late Ottoman and Early Republic periods, with the role of these texts in the architectural history and architectural historiography of the Ottoman-Turkish modernization period will be discussed. Celal Esad Arseven's professional career during the late Ottoman and early 20th century was multifaceted. With this versatility, he has prepared printed texts in all the disciplines he is interested in. The texts are about history and professional practices in the broadest sense. Architecture, photography, literature, librarianship, municipality, painting, art history, archaeology, music, travel writing and theater stand out as specialized sub-topics of his books. On the other hand, the fact that he published so many works and some of his books could not be identified, makes it difficult to create a complete bibliography. In this study, architectural works will be determined among books prepared in different disciplines and these texts will be examined in the context of architectural historiography of the Ottoman-Turkish modernization period. The main purpose of this analysis was determined to specify the conceptual frameworks of written texts in terms of architectural history by examining the text contents.