Conservation of Historical Environments

Conservation isn't just about saving old buildings — it's about deciding what a society chooses to remember, who gets to define "heritage," and how layered historical fabric survives inside a modernizing city. You'll work through international charters (Venice, Burra), unpack Turkey's specific legal and sociopolitical conservation landscape, and produce two short essays plus a research paper analyzing real restored sites and the ethical, economic, and design tensions around reuse. As a senior required studio-adjacent course, it pulls together the history and theory threads from earlier years and gives you the vocabulary to defend restoration decisions you'll later make in practice or in graduate work.