Inside/Outside Islamic Art and Architecture

A Cartography of Boundaries in and of the Field

Saygin Salgirli, Saygin Salgirli

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501341861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

When we walk into a gallery, we have a fairly good idea where the building begins and ends; and inside, while observing a painting, we are equally confident in distinguishing between the painting-proper and its frame and borders. Yet, things are often more complicated. A building defines an exterior space just as much as an interior, and what we perceive to be ornamental and marginal to a given painting may in fact be central to what it represents. In this volume, a simple question is presented: instead of dichotomous separations between inside and outside, or exterior and interior, what other relationships can we think of? The first book of its kind to grapple with this question, Inside/Outside Islamic Art and Architecture focuses on a wide spectrum of mediums and topics, including painted manuscripts, objects, architectural decoration, architecture and urban planning, and photography. Bringing together scholars with diverse methodologies-who work on a geographical span stretching from India to Spain and Nigeria, and across a temporal spectrum from the thirteenth to the twenty-first century-this original book also poses engaging questions about the boundaries of the field.

1

In and out of a local idiom

The story of a Siedlung in Yenimahalle, Ankara¹

Kıvanç Kılınç

In 1948, just a stone’s throw from the perimeters of Ankara’s planned city centre, a new neighbourhood began to sprout on a 1-million-square-metre land. Initiated by the municipal administration to address the housing shortage in the fast-growing capital city, the Yenimahalle Settlement has left a strong mark on the history of affordable housing in Turkey for several reasons.² First, prior to this project affordable housing was rarely imagined beyond the narrow boundaries of small-scale residential complexes developed to accommodate government employees near public institutions. Second, Yenimahalle has since remained as one of the rare instances in the whole country where the ‘sites and services’ method in housing production was employed.³ But more importantly for the purposes of this chapter, it has exemplified the role of locality and place in the production of modern residential culture in Turkey.

Catering predominantly to the needs of the lower-middle-income and middle-income groups and drafted by a group of Turkish architects, the floor plans of the type-projects displayed strong similarities with Bruno Taut’s and Ernst May’s designs for the mass-housing estates (Siedlungen) developed in Berlin and Frankfurt in early twentieth century. The interiors were imagined for small, modern nuclear families, reproducing an idealized middle-class domestic environment, widely disseminated in architectural and popular journals in 1930s Turkey, with its ‘cubic’ style and simplified furniture design.⁴ While most of the units were built following the original blueprints provided by the municipal government and consisted of row houses, however, some of the owners acquired alternative projects drafted by local builders shortly after the project set off in the early 1950s. These new layouts reinstated the multipurpose main hall, much similar to the sofa found in ‘traditional’ Ottoman-Turkish houses of the late nineteenth century, which the original architectural projects did not include.⁵ They were not only larger in size but included an additional floor and were suitable to accommodate extended families.

In particular, I trace the personal story of one of these examples, the Cevdet Cingi House (House no. 36 at building lot 8053) at Levent Street in Yenimahalle, from the first amendments to the floor plan to its recent destruction to be replaced by a four-storey apartment building.⁶ My interest is focused specifically on the design and reordering of internal spaces, and the correlation between spatial organization and the social, cultural and domestic practices in the neighbourhood, including its contemporary moment. In doing so, I seek to contribute to the pool of critical writings on the social history of affordable housing in Turkey, especially from the point of view of the transformation of the interiors. I argue that each phase in the story of this building and the subsequent alterations in design are a testament to the changing values linked to the idea of modern architecture, modern house and the modern family in Ankara.

Building the lower-middle-class ideal: A social history

In the 1930s Turkey did not have a significant industry, and a few examples of workers’ houses were largely limited to state-run factory complexes.⁷ The new neighbourhoods planned during the interwar years were imagined largely as middle-class settlements, and only an insufficient amount of affordable public housing could be produced, mostly due to lack of funds and infrastructure. Beginning in the late 1940s, European policies of the social welfare state became more pronounced in Turkey, increasing the state’s role in the production of housing.⁸ For instance, the Housing Law, passed in 1944, required the government to provide dwellings for civil servants.⁹ During the same years both official reports and popular journals repeatedly suggested that the national administration should take initiative in providing cheap land and reforming existing housing cooperatives that did not produce inexpensive alternatives.¹⁰ Such debates heralded the birth of the Yenimahalle project as a new neighbourhood and set both a conceptual and a legal framework for subsequent developments.

The Yenimahalle Settlement (1948–52) was a project developed by the Ankara municipality, which expropriated large tract of lands starting from 1945. The area chosen for the project was in north-western Ankara, nearby the important Ankara-Eskişehir-Afton railroad axis, and was located outside the area of the original Jansen Plan for the city (1932).¹¹ The Başvekalet (Prime Ministry) Housing Cooperative, as well as individual owners and the treasury, owned this land.¹² The municipality merged the three separate parts before the construction began.¹³ Yenimahalle was not developed directly by the public sector, but both the central and local administration played a crucial role by enacting laws to support the project. The municipality acquired floor plans by a national architectural competition. It also provided land at affordable costs, infrastructure, easy access to building materials and long-term and low-interest credit to the 3,500 families who were selected from the many applicants.¹⁴

The selection committee was formed by Turkish nationals, including Abidin Mortaş, the influential editor of Arkitekt, a prominent architectural journal at the time. The results for the winning entries for five different types of houses and the site plan were announced in 1949 in Mimarlık, the publication of the Chambers of Architects of Turkey.¹⁵ None of the entries for the site plan, however, received a winning prize and the selection committee came up with a ‘hybrid’ solution: in Zeynep Önen’s words, they combined ‘the second and third prizes . . . bringing together the “successful site plan” of the second prize with the “advantageous number of lots” provided by the third prize’.¹⁶ The majority of lots were spared for houses while the amount of space allocated for roads, open public spaces and bazaars was 32.5 per cent.¹⁷

The municipality of Ankara supplied credits for the 3,500 families and sold the land for one Turkish lira per square metre.¹⁸ The largest building lot was 300 square metres and the average monthly income of a civil servant was 200 Turkish liras, which made even those affordable for the majority of settlers. In addition, there were long-term credit options.¹⁹ The owners could make their payments in ten instalments over ten consecutive years, with low-interest rates.²⁰ In addition to convenience provided for payments the municipality informed the residents about the building costs. In order to make the building materials more accessible, the establishment of brickyards in the settlement area was also permitted.²¹ The plans for execution were finalized in 1948, construction began in 1949 and the project was completed by the end of 1953.²²

Since Yenimahalle was also known as Ucuz Arsalar (cheap lands), it seems that the project has served its purpose well.²³ According to Özcan Altaban, major principles of the project are still valid, addressing the housing problem today: ‘cheap land and substructure, obligatory construction and appropriate credit supplies’.²⁴ Both the central and municipal governments played a crucial role by enacting laws to support the project. These were the laws 5218 and 5228, which passed the National Assembly in 1948.²⁵ The former enabled the municipality to distribute the land in its possession to individuals provided they build homes. The latter allowed the municipality to take over land or property possessed by other public institutions to develop housing projects. The laws required that if the construction were not completed within a three-year period, the land would revert to the government.²⁶ Başak Aysal has underlined that by enabling such measures the government ‘aimed to prevent land speculation’ as well as tackled the housing shortage in the fast-growing capital city.²⁷

As the number of types that the plan set out to develop shows, the target group for the project was low- and moderate-income civil servants.²⁸ According to the plan, the average-sized three-room type was going to dominate the project (1670 houses) in comparison to five-room type (228), four-room type (571) and two-room (single storey) type (481).²⁹ It also shows that the ideal family size for the developers consisted of married couples with one child or two children. In all two-storey types, common familial spaces such as the guest and dining rooms on the first floor were separated from the bedrooms and the bathroom on the second floor. A small toilet for the guests was placed next to the entrance hall, which connected to the kitchen as well as the dining and...