This talk is about ruins and their perception. Focusing on ruins, a foray will be made into the tangled relationship between history, mythology, literature and the past in architectural historiography. How does imagination navigate between verbal and visual narratives where ruins are concerned? What can ruins tell us? Beyond constituting bridges between past and present, the utility of ruins in designing memory will also be highlighted using evidence from Rome, Ancyra and Gordion.

Biography:

Suna Güven studied at Wellesley College and MIT with an Independent Major in Architectural Studies. Having completed her PhD in History of Architecture and Urbanism at Cornell University in 1983, she has been teaching in Middle East Technical University since 1985 where she was one of the founders of the graduate program in Architectural History. Her areas of teaching and research are identities, cultural relations and memory in Roman architecture and medieval Latin architecture in the Eastern Mediterranean.