Filkret Yegul

Professor, History of Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara
Department of the History of Art and Architecture

Howard Crosby Butler, the Director of the First Sardis Expedition:
Discoverer, Recoverer, Sullied Hero

Monday, April 14, 2008
5:30 P.M. - Lawrence J. Plym Auditorium
Temple Hoyne Buell Hall

Alan K. and Leonarda F. Laing Lecture

Biography

Trained as an architect
B. Arch, Middle East Technical University, 1964
B. Arch, Yale University, 1965
M.Arch, University of Pennsylvania, 1966
(studied with the late architect Louis Kahn)
Ph. D. History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, 1975
Specializes in Greek and Roman architecture and urban planning

Participated in various archaeological excavations in Italy (Cosa), Greece Isthmia), North Aftica (Thurburbo Majus), but mainly in Sardis, Turkey, a Harvard University expedition. At Sardis Yegul was responsible for the design and reconstruction of the ‘Marble Court,’ and the partial excavation, architectural study and publication of the Imperial Bath-Gymnasium Complex. He just completed a two-decade long study of the Temple of Artemis in Sardis, which includes full architectural and digital recording and reconstructing the gigantic building and a new study that promises to change the building history of this architectural landmark as we know it. It will be publishes as two folio volumes.

Yegul is the author of many articles and several books, among them The Bath-Gymnasium Complez in Sardis (1986); Gentlemen of Instinct and Breeding: Architecture at the American Academy in Rome, 1895-1940 (1991); Baths and Bathing in Classical Antiquity (1992 and 1995), which was recently revised and translated into Turkish. The book received the prestigious “Alice D. Hitchcock Award” of the Society of Architectural Historians. More recently, he co-authored with his Sardis colleagues, The City of Sardis, Approaches in Graphic Recording (2003). His new Bathing in the Roman World is already submitted for publication and he is working with his wife Professor Diane Favro on a general book on Roman Architecture.

Yegul is currently engaged in a social and intellectual study of the history of the First Sardis Archaeological Expedition (which predates the present one though not officially connected to it), an important endeavor which started under an ailing empire and finished under a fledgling republic. Of particular significance is his biographical study of the expedition’s charismatic and controversial first director, Howard Crosby Butler, in the context of the era’s social, political and intellectual currents against changing perceptions of the notions of intellectual properties, and ethical and legal concerns about national identities and patrimonies—which, in the main, is the subject of his talk today.