Author(s)

N. Sağlar Onay

Abstract

Analysing and understanding the historic environment gives us the possibility to deeply grasp the inseparable relations between form, structure, and material, which gives historic buildings a unique character and defines architectural identity. But understanding all these underlying issues needs a critical and active engagement with the built environment. Evaluating the historic environment with an intuitive approach can feed the design process but it may also lead to the undervaluation of certain issues, which may in fact be very important in terms of cultural significance. This paper aims to develop a framework to analyse historic buildings by focusing on space more than the architectural being. Therefore, it proposes to analyse the historic environment with a continuous approach starting from urban scale to interior scale. The use of such a framework aims to structure the analysis of the historic environment with a concentric approach on human experience and it targets to feed the adaptive reuse process and related design activities.

Keywords

historic buildings, cultural significance, spatial analysis, adaptive reuse, interior space, human experience