The typological process of the Anatolian houses in Tophane district, Alanya,

As a hill-edge settlement, the Tophane district is one of the well-preserved neighborhoods of Alanya, despite some ruined or, more precisely, morphologically altered Anatolian houses that show several common characteristics (Kapancı, 2008). Caniggia and Maffei (2001) described the typological process as originating from the base building type and the subsequent synchronic or diachronic variants. This paper investigates the typological process of the Anatolian houses in the Tophane district by individuating the base type and outlining the synchronic and diachronic variants. After investigating the historical maps starting from the XVI century and the existing literature, we derived the architectural surveys and photos of eight Anatolian houses from Kapancı’s (2008) thesis on the Tophane district and used them to create a matrix chart describing the typological process. The parcel boundary sizes of ten ruined houses in the upper part of the district were compared with the eight selected examples verifying their compatibility. The analysis of the typological process in Tophane houses proposes all eight houses as synchronic variants but diachronically derived from the same primitive dual-cellular base type as visible in the remains of the oldest houses. On the other hand, the results suggest that even though there is no documentary evidence of an urban settlement before the XVI century, this hill-edge urban tissue could have been established in an early phase, before the construction of the medieval Castle in a hill-top position (Strappa, Carlotti & Camiz, 2016).