Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Metu Journal of the Faculty of Architecture, cilt.42, sa.1, ss.65-99, 2025 (AHCI)
Interest in the simple, ordinary and everyday rather than heroic stories in biography writing has increased in recent years. In parallel, rather than creative geniuses or stars in architectural history writing, interest in the biographies of professionals, who are in routine architectural practice or whose labor is anonymous to the public, has naturally increased. In the biographies of ordinary individuals, similarities seem remarkable, as opposed to differences and striking points. We can think of such biographies as examples of a single cell taken from a particular social tissue and describing similar ones. In this article, Toğan Düzgören is examined as a case study. It is a [photo]biography of a painter-architect who was born to an upper-middle class family in the last period of the Ottoman Empire, continued his primary and secondary education in the Republic era, educated in Europe (even if not completed), worked in the public sector from 1950 to 1979 and remained an active participant in Istanbul's cultural and artistic circles until the 2000s. Photographs have been included as a part of the narrative, based on the rich visual material left by Düzgören. Documents belonging to Düzgören have been supplemented by detailed archive research and oral interviews and contextualized within the framework of architectural history literature. Düzgören's [photo]biography illustrates the education that architects of the period received not only in Turkey but also in Europe, especially the common tendency of Galatasaray High School graduates towards painting, the influence of this interest on architectural education, architecture practice within the public sector, and the routine flow of daily life and socio-cultural environment of an upper-middle class family member.