'Gentlemen, it was necessary to abolish the fez, which sat on the heads of our people as an emblem of ignorance ...and hatred of progress and civilization. It was necessary to accept in its place the hat, used by the whole civilized world.' The rhetoric of the Turkish Republic's founder Kemal Ataturk roused the Turkish nation into a programme of modernization, and architecture played a crucial role in Turkey's march to modernity. This book offers an overview of modern Turkish architecture, placing it in the larger social, political and cultural context of the country's development as a modern nation in the twentieth century. It takes the reader from the end of World War I when the new Turkish Republic was born out of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, to the country's democratization after the 1950s in the midst of the Cold War's competing ideological forces and finally to the present when Turkey continues to be dramatically transformed through globalization, economic integration with the world market and transnational cultural influences, as well as its renewed preoccupations with identity, including Islam and Ottoman heritage.
This book reveals how young Turkish architects viewed modernism as the most appropriate expression of the positivist ideals of Kemalism and explores modern institutional masterpieces and architect-designed buildings through the decades. Yet the authors also focus on informal residential schemes and discuss how these have evolved from small settlements to colossal urban quarters that exist at a slippery threshold between legality and illegality. The book deftly extends the more typical surveys of modern architecture to include a 'non-western' country on the margins of Europe and it is unique in tackling the issue of the modern and contemporary periods that are typically omitted in traditional surveys of Islamic art and architecture. A richly informative history of Turkey's built environment by leading historian of the field Sibel Bozdogan and architectural critic Esra Akcan, this book will be of interest to architects as well as the general reader interested in the culture of Turkey.
