Research condition
Two sacred sites damaged in the same event, entering recovery under different institutional and community conditions—while access, use, and forms of custody continued to change.
What becomes visible when we read a place through its relationships?
Bir yeri ilişkileri üzerinden okuduğumuzda ne görünür hale gelir?
Before we ask how to preserve a place, we ask how to know it.
Heritage thinking has expanded well beyond monuments and buildings, into practice, memory, use, care, and continuity. The instruments have not kept pace: the analytical and institutional processes that inform decisions still act most readily on what is materially bounded, documented, officially recognized, and procedurally legible.
The difficulty is therefore not only how to attend to relationships. It is how material and immaterial, unofficial and official forms of continuity can be made visible within one comparable analytic field—before priorities, boundaries, and funding decisions are fixed.
A place is more than a collection of things; it can be read as a field of relationships. The Four-Quadrant Framework is the instrument that makes that field analytically legible. Developed as a methodological contribution of doctoral research in heritage preservation and empirically applied in post-earthquake Antakya, it positions documented acts across two intersecting continua and reads how their distribution holds, thins, or shifts over time.
The unit of analysis is the documented act—a specific, evidenced act positioned within the field, rather than a whole building, community, or ritual sorted into a box. In practice this means observing, documenting, mapping, and interpreting acts as they take shape across a place and over time.
What the method produces is not a label but a distribution: a field that can be read, compared across sites, and re-read across time.
Where documented acts concentrate, and what that concentration is made of.
Where the field is thin or empty—and whether that is a condition, a gap in evidence, or a limit of recognition.
Where one form of continuity relies on another to remain legible or supported.
How the distribution thickens, thins, or migrates between one moment and the next.
The empirical application of the Four-Quadrant Framework: two damaged sacred sites in post-earthquake Antakya, read comparatively and across time through documented acts.
Two sacred sites damaged in the same event, entering recovery under different institutional and community conditions—while access, use, and forms of custody continued to change.
Documented acts drawn from field observation, spatial and photographic documentation, and institutional records were positioned across both continua and read serially across the study window.
Across both sites, the comparison revealed a structured dependency between official heritage action and forms of community-carried continuity that precede it, persist through it, and are not produced by it.
The Framework was developed as a research instrument, but its function is diagnostic—which means it can enter a project wherever decisions about scope, priority, and care are being made.
Establishing what is already present in the field before priorities, boundaries, and funding decisions are fixed.
Testing whether different forms of continuity are entering the project field, or only the ones that are easiest to document.
Tracking how the distribution of documented acts and forms of care changes as intervention proceeds.
Assessing what was recognized, sustained, displaced, or left outside the intervention once it concluded.
These are application capacities of the method. Depending on the question and context, they can take the form of research commissions, advisory work, mapping studies, workshops and facilitated dialogue, collaborative research, or public and exhibition translation.
Architect, architectural historian, and heritage researcher, based in Chicago.
She developed the Four-Quadrant Framework through her doctoral research and applied it through longitudinal comparative research in post-earthquake Antakya—work informed by a longer relationship to the city. She founded iz(trace) to carry that research into applied, institutional, spatial, and public contexts.
iz is the Turkish word for trace: a partial, situated point of entry from which a field of relations can be read. It names where observation begins, not the method itself.
iz(trace) works with heritage projects at moments of change—when a place is being assessed, restored, reopened, reprogrammed, or otherwise transformed, and when decision-making needs a fuller view than the most readily documented evidence can provide. The Four-Quadrant Framework helps establish what forms of continuity are already active, which are institutionally visible, and what may otherwise remain outside the project field.
The Framework diagnoses; it does not prescribe an outcome. In an advisory engagement, iz(trace) uses its diagnostic findings to support context-specific decisions, discussion, and project development.
Identify the site, decision, programme, transition, or condition that needs to be understood.
Assemble relevant spatial observations, existing documentation, institutional records, community-generated material, and other traceable evidence appropriate to the question.
Position documented acts using the Framework’s stated criteria and read the resulting gaps, concentrations, dependencies, and temporal shifts.
Turn the analytical findings into a project-specific form that can support discussion, planning, monitoring, evaluation, or further project development.
Engagements are scoped to the question, the evidence available, and the stage of the project.
Establishing the field of documented acts around a site or project, and reading what its distribution reveals, ahead of decisions.
Applying the Framework to an ongoing project to test what is entering the field and what is falling outside it.
Working with teams, institutions, and communities to read a place together through evidence rather than assumption.
Translating relational analysis into publications, teaching, exhibitions, and other public-facing forms.
Depending on scope, a commission may result in a mapped analytical field, evidence register, concise report, decision brief, workshop synthesis, or monitoring update.
Potential collaborators include cultural and heritage institutions, municipalities and public agencies, NGOs and foundations, archives, community organizations, researchers and universities, and design teams.