See Kishwar Rizvi’s review of this book

Rereading Eurocentric or North American definitions of modernity has become a frequent pursuit for scholars during the last two decades. Instead of the virtual projection of one continuous modernism, discussions of the period’s heterogeneous character have emerged, and beyond that, cross-cultural debates have become important in understanding the spread and development of modernism outside Europe. Since Edward Said’s groundbreaking book Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), the hybridity and complexity of non-Western societies and cultures have become a new field of research. This new paradigm has entered the field of architectural history as well, for example, in the grand exhibition and publication, At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), with contributions by Zeynep Celik and Jorge Francisco Liernur. Like these authors, Sibel Bozdoğan has drawn our attention to a fairly unknown project of modernism at the edge between Europe and the Middle East: the “nation building” of modern Turkey under the authoritarian regimen of Mustafa Kemal Pasa (r. 1919–38), better known as Atatürk (Father of the Turks). In 1927, Atatürk decided to reform not only language/script, clothing, laws, and education but also architectural education and architecture itself, demonstrating his will to represent political power through modern architecture. Architects from Austria and Germany, most working outside avant-garde circles, were invited to build a new school of architecture (Ernst Egli and later Bruno Taut) and the new capital Ankara (Hermann Jansen and Clemens Holzmeister). This combination of Westernization and nation building, as reconciliation between the modern and the national, was not unique. In Europe, its margins, and beyond, young nations or national movements also used modern architecture for political purposes, especially in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Lebanon, and Jewish Mandate Palestine.

Sibel Bozdoğan’s compelling study—an important piece of scholarship honored by the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians with its 2002 Elizabeth Hitchcock Award—leads us directly into Turkish discourses on modernity, connecting the cultural, political, and architectural debates between the 1920s and 1940s. She unfolds Turkish documents, published in newspapers, magazines, and journals of that time that are virtually unknown to both Turkish and non-Turkish readersin order to reveal a complex view from inside Turkey. In this sense her work contrasts with my book, Moderne und Exil: Deutschsprachige Architekten in der Türkei, 1925–1955 (Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen, 1998), which focuses on the contribution of German-speaking architects in Kemalist Turkey during the same period and which offers mostly non-Turkish (but likewise unknown) sources to this debate.

The conclusion reveals the effort of Bozdoğan’s enterprise: the failure of the Kemalist revolution in spite of the present attitude of Turkish society toward modern architecture. She writes: “Yet to this day the strong identification of the buildings, music, or other cultural production of the 1930s with the near-sacred legacy of Atatürk has kept them beyond criticism, and any such criticism could easily be regarded as a threat to the republic itself. This is an unfortunate rigidity, because the hybrid cultural expressions of the 1990s reveal that although the Kemalist revolution may have failed to impose its own Western models, it succeeded in undoing the cultural, artistic, and architectural norms of a traditional Muslim society in a unique and irreversible way” (301). I am not so sure whether the dichotomy of West vs. Islam alone can characterize the situation of today. Is it not reasonable to consider that Turkey represents a state of twentieth-century hybrid culture at the margins of Europe that, in contrast to the Arab countries, has resulted from a process of a so-called “inboard-colonization”? M. Hakan Yavuz recently has offered a postcolonial explanation: “Modern Turkey, like a transgendered body with the soul of one gender in the body of another, is in constant tension…. The soul of white Turkey and its Kemalist identity is in constant pain and conflict with the national body politic of Turkey” (Journal of International Affairs 54, no. 1, 2000: 21). While in the 1920s the young Turkish republic referred to Islam as “religio-territorial identity” instead of ethnicity, and on the other side a “secular ethno-linguistic nationalism” was favored by Atatürk and his paladins, actually two version of nationalism competed. This explains why architectural discourse also oscillated between rigid modernism after a European model and an emphasis on the cultural legacy of the Ottoman/Turkish Empire.

In six chapters Bozdoğan brings us the crucial points of that debate and gives us insight into the foundations of its discourse. Beginning with the years of transition, the author unfolds the legacy of Ottoman Revivalism in chapter 1. As early as 1913, the political movement of the “Young-Turks” sought to create a national architecture apart from the Arab and Selçuk legacy, with reference to the Golden Age of Suleyman and his architect Sinan. This continued in the first years of the republic, where the national body of Turkey was formed. Bozdoğan reveals how Kemalist propaganda celebrated the alleged break as a shift toward the modern, although personal and institutional continuity was upheld. The real turn occurred in 1930, when Atatürk’s government created new institutions and appointed new people in the fields of architecture and fine arts. According to the cultural debate of the “original Turkish” (öztürk), Turkification was actually oriented to the model of central European modernism. A cubic style, called “Style Kübik,” resulted. Bozdoğan convincingly shows that in the 1920s “Turkification” had happened twice, once by adapting Ottoman forms, and then by rejecting those forms (33).

In chapters 2–4, the author carefully lays out the modern movement in relationship to political reforms, analyzing the formation of a Turkish culture of architecture that was significantly Kemalistic. The material is considered on three levels: the first concerns architectural discourse in journals such as Mimar/Arkitekt (1931/35), the second focuses on art institutions and educational concepts, and the last considers the architecture itself.

When the architects claimed an “architectural revolution” (inkilap mimarisi), they followed the political elite in notion and thought. This was a completely different starting point from that in Europe, where modernism arose out of artistic discussions in connection with a two-hundred-year-old debate on the transformation of society. Art in Turkey, and architecture in particular, thus followed less autonomous principles than in Western and Central European countries. Architecture was to become the mirror of the modern state, and “foreigners became the true ‘architects’ of Kemalist Turkey” (71). Bozdoğan presents the different facets of that “revolution.” The educational reform that brought more than three hundred scholars into Turkey—most from Germany and Austria—and the building policy for education were the central pieces of this enterprise, together with an emphasis on the youth movement and its places. A third aspect lies in gendering the modern by propagating the new role of the modern, Westernized women in the reforms.

During this time, Turkey tried to create an image of a powerful nation where modern architecture had its place not only in industry but also in administrative and cultural buildings. Bozdoğan makes unmistakably clear how sharply vision and reality differed, because no building industry really existed and the country itself was almost completely rural. An important paragraph analyzes the concept of the cubic house and the ideology of the villa. On the basis of this type, architects such as Sedad Eldem or immigrants like Taut discussed the inadequacy of the “white cubic” conception for housing in general. Instead of “fashion” they wanted the old Turkish houses to be reconsidered. Finally, after 1938—the year of the death of both Atatürk and Taut—a new chapter opened in “nationalizing the modern” (240–93).

Bozdoğan writes: “The modern forms of buildings in Turkey in the 1930s were neither simple extensions of the European Modern Movement nor ‘logical consequences’ of the new materials and construction techniques of the industrial age that were supposed to determine these forms. They were largely representations of an imported modernity” (192). Because of this fact, modern architecture lacked identity as long as the Kemalist movement was consolidated. Nationalism in Turkey oscillated between vernacular and authoritarian urban patterns. As a result of the international competition for the Great National Assembly (its parliament) in 1937, the Second National Style was overcome by neoclassical patterns. After 1943, when the National Socialist propaganda exhibition New German Architecture was shown, and the arrival of the German Paul Bonatz, official architecture in Turkey took a strong turn toward the National Socialist style. Bozdoğan encompasses all of the developments in architecture from the death of Atatürk to the competition on Atatürk’s mausoleum in 1942 and ends her debate with the close of the 1940s, where—in parallel to the political liberation in 1948/50—the North American paradigm of an apolitical International Style ended all discussions of authoritarian architecture.

What is fascinating in Bozdoğan’s study is the kaleidoscope of different aspects of developments in Turkish architecture. She reveals that the parallel existence of different conceptions was quite normal, and only Kemalist propaganda claimed the sharp break from its Islamic heritage as a positive attitude toward the new. This book is a study of a hybrid culture—in the best sense of the term—which should catch our interest because of its relevance in the current political climate. Nevertheless, the most Westernized Islamic culture reveals even in its architectural monuments that, as Yavuz writes, “the identity of Turkey is…neither Ottoman/Islamic nor European but incorporates elements of both” (Yavuz 270).