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Political opposition, the founding of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) in 1913, and political processes in the wake of World War I all led to the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923, with the war hero and nationalist Mustafa Kemal as its president. After 1913, the Turkish people’s main criterion of identity was to be its sense of nationality, of what it means to be Turkish, as opposed to the earlier Ottoman Islamic identity. Kemal was honoured with the title Gazi (war hero and fighter for the Islamic faith) in 1921, and adopted the name Atatürk (Turkey’s father) in 1934. He led Turkey’s only political party, the Republican People’s Party (RPP), which had just one principal aim on its agenda: the modernisation of society, on structural, social and cultural levels.

The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier (pseudonym for Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, 1887-1965) was a central spokesman for the ideology of modernism in Europe. His enquiring gaze and the notes he made during his grand tours to many of Europe’s important historical towns constituted a type of architectural research which he used systematically as a basis for his own architectural theory and practice. Visiting Istanbul for the first time in 1911, he documented his trip by means of a diary and sketchbooks (Le Corbusier 2002). The observations Le Corbusier made on that journey offer a valuable insight into Istanbul during the first decade of the 20^th century: “Wooden houses with large spread-out roofs warm their purple colours amidst fresh greenery and within enclosures whose mystery delights me, [although] they group themselves quite harmoniously around all these summits formed by really enormous mosques …” (Le Corbusier 2007: 90). The fact that this urban structure was so ruthlessly obliterated in the course of the 20^th century was something even the modernist Le Corbusier characterised as catastrophic (Le Corbusier 2007: 160). He also described with great sorrow a massive fire that reduced 9,000 houses to ashes. It is precisely because of all the fires which still destroy the traditional, Turkish timber houses that even Le Corbusier recognised as masterpieces that the city is constantly being renewed, albeit rarely for the better.

Fig. 1. Amcazade Hüseyin Paşa Yalisi, Asian shore of Bosporus north of Anadolu, probably from the 17^th century. Considered one of the most important examples of Ottoman wooden architecture. D-DAI-IST-KB9404 (photographer and year unknown).

A further source of pressure on the architectural heritage was the new, Westerninspired architecture that the so-called Young Turks wanted for their new country. The Young Turks (Jön Türkler), a movement of dissent founded largely by military cadets in 1889, attracted support from artistic circles as well as among civil servants and scientists. The Young Turks, who opposed the Ottoman sultanate in general and the rule of Sultan Hamid II in particular, became a significant political force in 1908, providing a springboard for Atatürk’s rise to power a few years later. Le Corbusier warned Atatürk that the new architectural ideals threatened to undermine appreciation of the masterpieces of earlier architects, which included mosques, hammams, and the original and richly varied Ottoman timber architecture. He later regretted that this position had thrust him onto the sidelines, as recorded in an interview of 1949:

If I had not committed the most strategic mistake of my life in the letter I wrote to Atatürk, I would be planning the beautiful city of Istanbul, instead of my competitor Henri Prost. In this notorious letter, I foolishly recommended to the greatest revolutionary hero of a new nation to leave Istanbul as it was, in the dirt and dust of centuries (Bozdoğan: 67).

I shall take Le Corbusier’s perspective as a point of departure for this article, which will explore some of the architectural ideals of the young Turkish nation during its first half century as a republic. Le Corbusier also drew attention to what will concern us in the following: architecture as a marker of political hegemony. In taking a closer look at the dynamics of architectural developments in 20^th century Turkey, it is important to note the nuances and geographical differences affecting the concept of “modernism”. Architectural history was dominated by the Euro-centric and North American perspective until late in the 20^th century. The past three decades, however, have seen the publication of considerable academic material that explores many different histories and expressive idioms associated with modernism in non-Western societies.

Traditionally, studies of non-Western cultures have aimed to explore the exotic. Cultures outside the industrialised regions were seen as interesting primarily because they represented the unfamiliar, often a culture that was viewed as underdeveloped relative to that of the West, to the extent that the latter could be treated as a single entity. Modernity was regarded as a European-American category, which “others” could import, accept, or perhaps oppose, but which they could not reproduce from within their own cultural sphere. Edward W. Saïd gives a detailed account of this cultural “asymmetry” in his reference work Orientalism from 1978.

In countries outside the regions of Western Europe and North America, the phenomenon of “modernisation” did not always have far-reaching social consequences, unlike the profound social changes of the 19^th century and the transition to industrialised, urban and market-oriented structures. In some places modernisation constituted an official programme, developed and implemented either by a colonial power or by an ambitious elite in authoritarian nations, by regimes that placed great emphasis on architecture and urban planning as a kind of physical embodiment of policy. A full consideration of the architectural idioms that were regarded as modern takes us far beyond conventional notions of modernist architecture as the expression of an international style, stripped bare of national or traditional features.

By the time Atatürk turned his full attention to the construction of modern Turkey, he had already outmanoeuvred the central power holders of Ottoman society in favour of the idea of Turkey as a nation-state. The Sultan was deposed as head of the Empire in 1922, while the top religious leader of all Muslims, the Caliph of Istanbul, was dismissed in 1924. Admittedly, Atatürk installed leading members of the former political and religious bodies in new positions of authority, but it is still remarkable that one leading individual could succeed in binding the loyalty of such an ethnically diverse population to a single national identity, that of Turkey.

In order to make such radical, centrally imposed reforms appear fundamental and worth striving for, and in order to render this value set functional on an individual level, it was necessary to establish a range of ideals and concepts concerning what was best suited to serve the nation and the individual as hegemonic and legitimate. Whereas the substance of the former can be determined and implemented by the state, the latter poses a far greater challenge. In a non-authoritarian society at least, values must be recognised as morally and legally valid. Originally, the concept of hegemony was applied to those Greek city-states that dominated other city-states, and by analogy the term has been used to describe any state that exercises dominance or leadership over another. The dominance of an empire over its component and subordinate states can also be characterised as hegemonic.

The Italian politician and philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) developed a revised and expanded definition of the concept of hegemony that could be applied to social classes. Where society is characterised by cultural diversity, it can be dominated by one social class and its set of values, norms and practices. This in turn forms the basis for a complex system of political, social and economic values that establish themselves as dominant (Gramsci: 10, Adamson: 149). Gramsci describes social groups that do not initially represent a hegemony. But when individuals organise themselves into social classes or class alliances in response to foregoing class struggles, they are able to achieve a legitimate consensus in civil society, and thus to attain a dominant and frequently “hegemonic” position. Thus a cultural hegemony is formed. Given Gramsci’s analysis and reasoning, it might seem to be straining a point to adopt the term as a central principle in the current study. In Turkey it was single individuals as members of the new regime rather than oppressed classes who established a new hegemony, not least through the use of architecture as a crucial instrument. In other words, the term is not applied here as directly analogous to Gramsci’s concept, although I still consider it applicable to any newly established power configuration that encompasses as much ethnic diversity as we find in Turkey. Over the years, however, this regime showed an ambivalence about how to project its own status to the outside world. It is possible to identify clear but changing architectural preferences among the major national construction projects that have been implemented in Turkey.

Atatürk’s programme of modernisation entailed radical changes to society on many levels, affecting government, power structures, and people’s everyday lives down to the finest detail. In 1926, Islamic law (sharia) was replaced with a new legal system based on that of Swiss legal practice, and in 1927 Arabic script was replaced with the Latin alphabet. A completely new form of civilisation was to be introduced, which meant a fundamental change from the ethnic and organisationally fragmented Ottoman Empire to a new, Western and secular nation. Considerable emphasis was placed on the outward aesthetics of everything from clothing and hairstyles to architecture and urban planning as a way of providing momentum for this change.

The development of what we might call leading architectural cultures, in the plural and evolving, in the young Turkey says a lot about the directions and architectural styles that established themselves as hegemonic. Turkey has always been a transition zone between West and East, between Occidental and Oriental cultures, both within the very different bounds of the Ottoman Empire, and today within the country’s current borders. This is clearly reflected in its architecture, not least in the period we will explore here. When we consider the buildings in Ankara, which was proclaimed capital in 1923, it is as if Western-inspired architecture, with its elements of international style, became the norm from one day to the next. Even so, it is interesting to study how the cultures of Ottoman and Western modernist architecture were introduced and how they were balanced with each other over time, and how preferences for both national and international styles established hegemonies and influenced developments. Those at the forefront of the hectic construction of a new capital, thanks not least to their intellectual ballast, made crucial contributions to the design of Ankara’s central districts. Both France and Germany had played leading parts in building up the art academies where architects had been educated since the mid-18th century. Architects from these two countries in particular also set their stamp on architectural developments both before and after the founding of the new Republic of Turkey.