Reading Layered Industrial Heritage Through Graphic Documentation: Adaptive Reuse, Morphological Continuity, and Selective Legibility at Cibali

İngilizce (OpenAlex)

Adaptive reuse has become a central strategy for extending the cultural, environmental, and functional life of industrial heritage, yet the ways in which intervention logic becomes legible in multilayered heritage complexes remain insufficiently formalized. This article examines the Cibali complex in Istanbul, a former tobacco and cigarette factory reused as a university, cultural, and museum setting, in order to explain how document-based analysis can reconstruct patterns of continuity, loss, re-construction, contemporary addition, and layer articulation. Methodologically, the study develops a multi-scalar reading protocol based on the cross-matching of historical maps, aerial photographs, plans, sections, elevations, restoration proposals, and post-implementation visual material across parcel, block, courtyard, façade, structural-system, and archaeological-layer scales. The findings show that continuity was preserved primarily at the levels of parcel structure, waterfront relation, massing, façade rhythm, and silhouette, whereas more intensive transformation occurred in interior spatial organization, void re-definition, structural re-configuration, and archaeological musealization. The study concludes that adaptive reuse at Cibali operated not as a uniform conservation process, but as a differentiated and selective regime of legibility in which some historical layers were foregrounded while others were transformed, displaced, or made secondary. The significance of the article lies in proposing a case-tested analytical protocol for reading document-rich, multilayered industrial heritage sites, while recognizing that its broader transferability requires further validation through comparative application to additional cases.