Persona Construction of Cengiz Bektaş as Poetarchitect

Abstract

This article examines the expression “poet-architect” that Cengiz Bektaş used as a signature in his writings in response to questions about his identity. This self-preŞentation ranges from literature, art history, archeology, and politics. It is fed by a social capital extending from philosophy to sociology, engineering, and architecture. With his personal and professional knowledge within such social capital, Bektaş produced prolific material from the 1960s until the last years of his life. Thus an interest in culture, politics and architectural historiography arose around his name “poet-architect Cengiz Bektaş”; it has also been both the subject and the object of a persona construction. Bektaş’s poet and architect identities were shaped by common processes. While Bektaş’s poetic practice was described as “a concrete poetry that appeals to the mind”, his architectural practice was generally evaluated in terms of “vernacular modernism”, “alternative contextualism”, “critical regionalism” and regarded as realistic and rational practices that did not leave any room for surprises. On the other hand, some of his projects have features that cannot be explained by realism or rationality alone; they preŞent a certain level of quotation, citation, transfer, and interpretation beyond the relationship of locality, form and function. In addition, it is worth questioning the silence of an actor who has written many texts as a poet and writer, regarding his own architecture. This article aims to read the poet-architect signature of Cengiz Bektaş as a persona construction, which brings together his poet identity with his architect identity through his architectural works. Some of Bektaş’s articles, which he wrote during different periods, as well as his projects and other works that can be followed along with them, are the materials the article examines. To assess the social capital defined as a scope from which the poet-architect signature is nourished as summarized in Bektaş’s own words, “the faith in intellectuals” and the accompanying “claim for criticism and reason”, Peter M. Haas’s “epistemic community” and Paul Feyerabend’s concepts of “critical rationalism” are used. © 2022, Metu Journal of the Faculty of Architecture. All Rights Reserved.