Formation of architectural history as a discipline in modern architectural education in Turkey

Architectural history courses, which examine the architectural works, buildings, and social structure of societies from various civilizations, regions, and ages with multiple viewpoints, are an important part of architectural education. In Turkey, within the scope of the education programs, architectural history courses take place in doctorate, master, and undergraduate programs, and in terms of undergraduate education, they are one of the critical elements of the compulsory courses. Undergraduate architectural education and architectural history courses are taught in 101 of Turkey's 204 universities, but when these courses are examined from a varied perspective, they show differences in the distribution to the semesters, duration, scope and subject content, naming, course sources, or local and national crediting. While this situation causes an architecture student studying architecture in Turkey to graduate with knowledge of architectural history at different scales, it also contradicts the National Qualifications Framework Charter in Turkey. Also, the consequences of this situation appear in many areas with negative examples both in education life and the built environment. In this context, within the scope of this study, architectural history courses in undergraduate architectural education in Turkey are examined through data from the ECTS information package with the purpose of revealing the portfolio of architectural history education. The main objective of this study is to examine the effects of the causes and consequences of these differences on architectural undergraduate education by analyzing the different approaches seen in the scope of Architecture History courses in undergraduate architecture education in Turkey using numerical data.