Turkey

Modern Architectures in History

Sibel Bozdogan, Esra Akcan

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781861899798
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Turkey: Modern Architectures in History offers a journey through the iconic buildings of Turkey that begins with the end of World War I, when the new Turkish Republic was born out of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, includes its democratization in the midst of the Cold War's competing ideologies, and concludes with the present day, in which Turkey continues to be dramatically transformed through globalization, economic integration, and a renewed appreciation for its Islamic and Ottoman heritage. Sibel Bozdogan and Esra Akcan explore modern institutional masterpieces and architect-designed buildings through the decades. Their focus includes informal residential plans, and they discuss how these have evolved from small settlements to colossal urban quarters that exist at a slippery threshold of legality. This richly informative history of Turkey's built environment goes beyond typical surveys of Western modern architecture and is unique in tackling the issue of the modern and contemporary periods that are often omitted in studies of Islamic art and architecture. Offering a perceptive overview of modern Turkish architecture, this book places it within the larger social, political, and cultural context of the country's development as a modern nation in the twentieth century.

References

Introduction

1 In addition to numerous recent books on modern architectures in individual countries like Turkey, Japan, China, India, Iran, Brazil and Indonesia, broader and comparative regional studies have challenged the Eurocentric biases of canonic histories of modern architecture. Especially relevant among recent publications are Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (London, 2003); Sandy Isenstadt and Kishwar Rizvi, eds, Modern Architecture and the Middle East (Seattle, WA, 2008); Jilly Traganou and Miodrag Mitrasinovic, eds, Travel Space and Architecture (Burlington, VT, 2009); Duanfang Lu, ed., Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity (London and New York, 2010); J. F. Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino, eds, Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean (New York, 2010); Mark M. Jarzombek, Vikramaditya Prakash and Francis D. K. Ching, A Global History of Architecture, 2nd edn (Hoboken, NJ, 2011).

2 Duanfang Lu, Third World Modernism, p. 11.

3 In our earlier work we have addressed the ‘nationalization’ of modernism in early Republican Turkey (Bozdoğan) and the ‘translations’ and cross-cultural encounters between Turkish and German-speaking architects during the same period (Akcan). See Sibel Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation-Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle, 2001) and Esra Akcan, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House (Durham, NC, 2012).

4 An important precedent is Uğur Tanyeli, Istanbul, 1900–2000: Konutu ve Modernleşmeyi Metropolden Okumak (Istanbul, 2004), in which, taking issue with writing the history of modern Turkish architecture primarily from the official and canonic examples of early republican Ankara, he argues that there is another, lesser-known Turkish modernism for which we must turn to the metropolitan experience of Istanbul since the late Ottoman period and look primarily at the residential work of anonymous designers and developers – namely, apartment buildings from turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau to 1950s modernism.

5 See also H.-J. Henket and H. Heynen, eds, Back from Utopia: the Challenge of the Modern Movement (Rotterdam, 2002), p. 398.

6 For example in the titles of Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: the Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley, 1995) and Stephen Kinzer, Crescent and Star: Turkey between Two Worlds (New York, 2008).

7 Of these, Inci Aslanoğlu, Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemi Mimarlığı, 1923–1938 (Ankara, 1980; reprint 2001) is still the standard reference.

8 For example the work of Ipek Akpınar, Bülent Batuman, Gülsüm Baydar, Cana Bilsel, Ali Cengizkan, Elvan Ergut, Murat Gül, Ela Kaçel, Zeynep Kezer, Uğur Tanyeli, Bülent Tanju, Ipek Türeli and Haluk Zelef. We would also like to include our previous works in this list.

9 For recent examples of such interdisciplinary volumes, see Sibel Bozdoğan and Resat Kasaba, eds, Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle, WA, 1997); Deniz Kandiyoti and Ayse Saktanber, eds, Fragments of Culture: the Everyday of Modern Turkey (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002); Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City (New York, 2005); Resat Kasaba, ed., The Cambridge History of Turkey: Turkey in the Modern World (Cambridge, 2008); Kerem Öktem et al., eds, Turkey’s Engagement with Modernity (Basingstoke, 2010); Deniz Göktürk, Levent Soysal and Ipek Türeli, Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (New York, 2010).

10 Something also articulated recently in Maiken Umbach and Bernd Huppauf, eds, Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment (Stanford, CA, 2005).

11 For ‘anxious modernism’ in the post-war period see Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Rejean Legault, eds, Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2000). For two classic texts of modernization theory, see Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (New York, 1958) and Cyril Black, The Dynamics of Modernization (New York, 1966).

12 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Malden, MA, 1990); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC, 1991); Appadurai Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996).

13 See especially Arif Dirlik, ‘Architectures of Global Modernity: Colonialism and Places’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, XVII/1 (Spring 2005), pp. 33–61, and Anna Klingmann, Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy (Cambridge, 2007).

chapter one: Architecture of Revolution

1 For an int...