University Campus Gates as a Tool of Identity Representation

With information age, it has become one of the primary aims of universities to contribute to transforming knowledge into social power. The university institution has to establish a domain of inuence spreading out from the micro-scale without isolating itself, because the knowledge produced must respond in social life and enter public circulation. This micro scale should be the urban environment in which the university is physically located. Therefore, today's universities should frst strengthen their relationship with their immediate surroundings, starting from the nearest. Within the plurality, uidity and complexity of social life, the process of building identities for individuals is an obligation. Similarly, public institutions also have to separate themselves from the context they are part of and establish their own identities. While doing so, university institutions put their special qualities in the foreground and design the representation of their institutional structures for the outside world. In this sense campus gates have great importance as the interface between city and university. These architectural constructions, which are designed as introductory buildings to represent the university, are the places where physical interaction between city and university frst takes place. The aim of this study is to discuss the architectural qualities of campus gates of universities in Turkey and try to decipher the forms in which identity formation takes place through given examples. In order to create a general panorama the examples were chosen without any distinctions such as private/state University, urban/ non-urban University, old/new university, etc.