Modernism and Nation Building

With the proclamation of the Turkish republic by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923, Turkey's political and intellectual elites attempted to forge from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire a thoroughly modern, secular, European nation-state. Among many other public expressions of this experiment, they imported modern architecture as both a visible symbol and an effective instrument of their modernizing agenda. They abandoned the prevailing Ottoman revivalist style and transformed the entire profession of architecture in Turkey according to the aesthetic canons and rationalist doctrines of European modernism. In this book, the architectural historian Sibel Bozdogan offers a cultural history of modern Turkish architecture and its connections to European modernism from the Young Turk revolution of 1908 to the end of the Kemalist single-party regime in 1950. Drawing on official propaganda publications, professional architectural journals, and popular magazines of the day, Bozdogan looks at Turkish architectural culture in its broad political, historical, and ideological context. Sibel Bozdogan has taught architectural history and theory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, MIT, and the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. She is the coeditor of Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey and the co-author of Sedad Eldem: Architect in Turkey. She lives in Boston.