By Sibel Bozdogan

Winner of the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award subsidized by way of the Society of Architectural Historians With the proclamation of the Turkish republic by way of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923, Turkey?s political and highbrow elites tried to forge from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire a completely smooth, secular, ecu geographical region. between many different public expressions of this daring social test, they imported smooth structure as either a visual image and a good device in their modernizing schedule. They deserted the existing Ottoman revivalist kind and reworked the whole career of structure in Turkey in response to the cultured canons and rationalist doctrines of eu modernism. during this booklet, the architectural historian Sibel Bozdogan bargains a cultural heritage of recent Turkish structure and its influence on eu modernism from the younger Turk revolution of 1908 to the top of the Kemalist single-party regime in 1950. Drawing on legit propaganda courses, specialist architectural journals, and well known magazines of the day, Bozdogan appears at Turkish architectural tradition in its huge political, old, and ideological context. She exhibits how sleek structure got here to be the first visible expression of the so-called republican revolution--especially in terms of consultant public constructions and within the idealized type of the trendy condo. She additionally illustrates Turkish architects? efforts to legitimize smooth types on rational, clinical grounds and to "nationalize" them by means of displaying their compatibility with Turkish construction traditions. After Ataturk?s demise in 1938, the preliminary innovative spirit in Turkish architectural tradition gave approach to nationalist developments in German and Italian structure and to the foundation of relevant Asian and pre-Islamic Turkish monuments. The ensuing departure from the detailed modernist aesthetic of the early Thirties towards a extra classicized and huge structure consultant of country energy introduced this heroic period of recent Turkish heritage to an in depth. at the present time, while Turkey?s undertaking of modernity is being significantly reevaluated from many views, this accomplished survey of Kemalism?s architectural legacy is well timed and provocative.