Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 67

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

However, the episode of garden city planning was not long-lived. Both the master plans of the Bahçelievler Housing Cooperative in Ankara and
later, those of six other cities (İzmit, Adana, Ceyhan, Tarsus, Mersin, Gaziantep) envisioned (mistakenly) an extremely low density and a sprawling
urban development for Turkey. As a result, less than three decades after construction, the houses and gardens of Bahçelievler were torn down to be
replaced by taller and larger multifamily apartment blocks, revealing the limits of low-density garden city housing in a rapidly developing and
urbanizing country. The second stop on the Germany-inspired architectural transfer was an unlikely successor, the Siedlung, which offered
metropolitan housing and residential neighborhoods within the city with a small-town image. Siedlung architects of the Weimar period defined their
task as providing solutions to the problems of the big city, rather than escaping to a new, small town.
Esra Akcan clearly demonstrates the impact of both these trends in Turkey over urban housing projects. However, there is not adequate discussion
on the time lag between the German model and the Turkish translation. More specifically, it is not clear why Turkish officials, with the possible
guidance of German architects, advocated in the 1930s the garden city model as the basis for master plans for many cities of Turkey, while the same
architects had already built the Siedlung style housing projects beginning in the 1920s in Berlin. Given the fact that German architects and city
planners were already aware of the limits of the garden city model, why not simply bypass this older trend and suggest the most up-to-date solution
to urban planning?
The third instance of convergence of architectural trends in Germany and Turkey coincided with the ethnic nationalist climate of Turkey, as well as
the fascist context of Europe. Now the emphasis was on the untranslatability of cultural identity and the myth of pure essential culture, which was
allegedly radically different and also superior to others. In the 1940s, the rise of fascist architecture in Germany and Italy were praised; and many
Turkish architects referred to these examples to justify their demand for state support for the rise of national architecture. Nationalist architects
differentiated “technical and material” attributes of architecture from “emotional, creative, and intuitive” ones. The former were translatable as they
were parts of a supposedly universal civilization, whereas the latter was made up of the untranslatable culture. Therefore, they searched for the
untranslatable culture, for the so-called Turkish original essence. As the architectural mind behind the Turkish house, Sedad Eldem emphasized the
national character of Turkish architecture. The old Turkish house was now regarded as the inspiration for the new architecture of the regime. While
in Bahçelievler, government officials asked for a European residential settlement, untouched by the old styles, a decade later the same officials
preferred a neighborhood (Siedlung Saraçoğlu) that allegedly originated from the old Turkish house. During this period, Eldem even proposed to
limit foreign architect's influence on Turkish architecture.
Akcan's book, in that respect, also sheds light upon the denial and exclusionary characteristics of Turkish nationalism. The categorization of
anonymous houses under the name of “Turkish house” was a significant distortion of history for nationalist purposes