ABSTRACT
Urban vernacular houses in Turkey were heritagized in the 1970s, a decade in which concrete-frame apartment buildings came to dominate the fabric of cities, especially that of Istanbul, the largest and fastest growing city in the country. Through architectural gallery exhibitions in the 1970s, and via more mainstream media representations (films, TV shows) later on, the traditional wooden house was framed as a cultural asset and shared inheritance that needed to be protected from rampant urbanization. This chapter discusses early efforts to heritagize the traditional wooden houses in the city. Many studies and monographs have contributed to the definition of the house as typology, dubbed variably as the "Ottoman" or "Turkish house"; however, the process by which it became a heritage object and even a "theme" has not received due critical scrutiny. Preservation of architectural heritage has been a cornerstone of European integration since the movement to merge began, but the constitution of heritage has changed radically over time.
