Browsing by Author "Wajdi, Nora"

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    Architecture, nostalgia and public interiors : the case of hotel lobbies
    (Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü, 2014-06) Wajdi, Nora; Ünsal Gülmez, Nilay
    In this thesis I focus on the conception of nostalgia in public interiors with an emphasis and case study on hotel lobbies. Within the scope of the literature review, I discuss the various definitions of nostalgia, through the concepts of melancholia, utopia, Zygmunt Bauman’s escape and its relation to the decade. Furthermore, I examine narrative nostalgia, its commercialisation through the American film industry and Western narrative nostalgia’s impact on the mystification of the East especially through the depiction of the veiled Ottoman harem women. Analysing the orientalisation of the endof- nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the Western modernisation of Istanbul in the 50s provides the basis for a comparative research on the concept of nostalgia at the hotel lobbies of the mythical Pera Palace Hotel (with its famous guests arriving en masse via the Orient Express) and the Hilton Hotel Istanbul, which rose as the first modernist hotel in Turkey at a time of a national identity crisis and an overall melancholy for a lost cityscape. With this research, including semi-structured interviews at both hotel lobbies, I investigate the tendency of varying female individuals to experience nostalgia depending on their degree of attachment to memories of their own past, while unfolding the impact of spatial elements, such as furniture, colours and dimensions that call forth nostalgia in hotel lobbies due to narratives and experiences associated with them.