The Problem of (Mis)use of Building Technology and Language of Heritage
Murat Çetin King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Saudi Arabia
The Role of Architecture on the Tourism Industry:
Chapter 11
ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to shed light on the nature of architecture, its technological and cultural ramifications on tourism industry. It elucidates the background of issues regarding the interaction between the fields of cultural production (architecture) and cultural consumption (tourism). The chapter argues that power of tourism industry has reached, under the pressure of global economics, to a capacity to turn even daily architecture into instruments of touristic show. In this context, technology is utilized as an instrument to produce such iconography only as a surface articulation. Thus, architecture becomes a commodity of touristic consumption in this current socio-economic and cultural context. The pressure of tourism industry seems to create a significant split between the architecture and its location in terms of specific cultural roots. This tendency is discussed as a potential threat to sustainability of tourism industry itself since it damages its own very source, that is to say, richness of cultural differences.
INTRODUCTION
Within the framework of the relationships among tourism management, approaches, global tourism trends and technology, this chapter aims to cast light on the status of architecture and its technological as well as cultural ramifications on the ongoing tendencies in tourism industry (Adorno, 1991). The main focus of this chapter is on the
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-867-8.ch011
use of global building technologies at the peril of local architecture which is a cultural asset for tourism (Bourdieu, 1993). In other words, building technology is tackled as a means which interferes in between tourism and heritage, and disturbs their natural, or rather, organic relationship (Fowler, 1993). Along this purpose, the