In a seminar on modern art at the Istanbul Design Center, İsmail Erdoğan says that art and life are intertwined, and that this is especially visible in old houses.
He adds that there is such a thing as “training the eye,” and that the eye is trained through beauty.
Then he recalls the story of a Turkish house master from Antalya, and tells a conversation from art historian Cengiz Bektaş’s book The Turkish House, a conversation he had with perhaps the last master of the Turkish house:
“How would the process of building a house actually happen?”
“When a client wanted me to build him a house, he would send one sack of wheat to my home. If the master sent that sack of wheat back to the client, it meant he did not accept the job. If he did not send it back, it meant he accepted.
From the moment the job was accepted, the families of the client and the master would begin visiting each other. In other words, they would become friends. They would go to each other’s homes for dinner, sit together, spend time together.
The master who would build the house, along with his family, would get to know the client and his family. He would see them in their own home, in their own place. He would understand their needs on site, and he would learn their worldview and their expectations from a house by experiencing them directly.
And over time, the master would begin to see what kind of house he should build. It would start to appear in his mind.”
At this point, does the client have the right to interfere?
No, not really.
But there are some things he can have a say in. There are examples, things that have been done before and lived in before. With or without a bay window, what the roof structure will be like, details of that kind. He can only offer opinions on those kinds of things.
Then Cengiz Bektaş asks a question:
“What if the client asks you for something ugly?”
The master’s answer is incredible. He says:
“He can’t.”
“How can he not?”
“He cannot show us an ugly example and ask us for something ugly, because everything he looks at is beautiful.”
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Seeing beauty and reflecting it back gives us things far more valuable than money.
Beautiful art first heals the person who makes it, and then those who look at it.
Someone who looks at beautiful things thinks beautifully, acts beautifully, and speaks beautifully.
It reflects from one person to another until, somehow, it reaches everywhere.
