(b. Paris, 1926).
Turkish historian of Islamic architecture. He studied in the faculty of architecture at Istanbul Technical University under Emin Onat, receiving his degree in 1949 for a study of Turkish Baroque architecture. He spent 1954–5 in Italy investigating Renaissance architecture, and 1962–3 in the USA on a Fulbright Fellowship. The following year he was a fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, where he studied Byzantine architecture in Anatolia, and for the next decade he was involved in the study and restoration of the Byzantine church known as Kalenderhane Cami in Istanbul. He taught architectural history and restoration at Istanbul Technical University from 1958 until his retirement in 1993 and was dean of the architecture faculty from 1974 to 1977. From 1978 to 1983 he served on the first Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and in 1980–81 he was Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His voluminous scholarship combines a thorough knowledge of European architectural history and theory with a close and intimate reading of Turkish and Islamic buildings and their structure....
