Seite - 148 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 4/2018

148 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Stefanie Bürkle | Identität durch Architektur cumstances, the supply of building matter and other material issues. However, this material aspect is always tied to people, to social contexts that form and express traditional ways of acting. This architecture speaks so to say local and regional dialects as well as foreign languages (Oliver 2006:17). Such an extended concept of identity that is provided by architecture leads to the oeuvre giving its builder-owner his identity. “Identity”, then, is not simply a cultural or economic set value that is realised in order to amaze a given social environment, but self-defi- nition that is operated based on experiences in different social situations (Berger et al. 1974). The concepts of space and built space of Turkish re-migrants exhibit differing social and spatial experiences that date back to the time when they left their country of origin, the time of their arrival in the receiving country or of visits back “home”. The houses of the re-migrants are in the first place buildings without architects. We were looking for houses, that “ordinary” people conceived and realised for themselves without a professional architect, since the project’s aim was not to document re-migrating architects but houses that were designed by laymen on their own, thus dealing with an “architecture with- out architects”. As architect and historian Rudofsky (1964, 1) put it, “Architecture Without Architects attempts to break down our narrow concepts of the art of building by introducing the unfamiliar world of non-pedigreed architecture. “The meaning of the terms vernacular, respectively non-pedigreed architecture for this kind of architecture without architects has been introduced in the realm of German academic language as anonymous architecture. It applies to both traditional farmhouses and newly built re-migrants’ houses, rid of the formal canon of academic architecture. Visual fieldwork led the researchers to distinguish three main types of houses: The model house, which gives a compact appearance, and has been realised as planned at the start of the planning process. The two-faced house, which is composed of German-type and Turkish-type elements clearly separated from one another. The multi-layer house, whose construction has progressed over many years, with changing relationships of German and Turkish construction concepts and materials. Re-migrants generally share a desire for their own house, in particular the first generation of emigrants to Germany in the 1960s. Working abroad was guided by the promise to return with the means to build a house, which would give the migrant the reputation of being successful. The contrast between the makeshift housing in Germany did not but fuel the desire for houses back home, whereas the neatly different urbanistic and social contexts of Germany and the idea of returning home encouraged investments into Turkish real estate. These transfers were paid by low living standards in Germany, until the bonds with Germany grew stronger and the emi- grants’ behaviour changed. As the purchase of real estate in Germany became more common, the acquisition of holiday-type second homes in Turkey increased. These have been realised in cooperatives and as kind of gated communities very much like the tourist enclaves along the Mediterranean coast. The visual fieldwork into the present topic is seen as a procedure of artistic research. Sub- stantially a transdisciplinary enterprise, it aims at amplifying and complementing scientific and artistic approaches. Thus it does not support the idea that art’s task is to break up scientific conventions but considers both domains as systems to answer questions and create knowledge. That is why the project makes use of phenomenological, sociological and artistic thick descrip-