See Bernd Nicolai’s review of this book

“All nationalist architecture is bad, but all good architecture is national.”

Bruno Taut, 1938.

The formation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk may be seen as one of the most radical and revolutionary moments in twentieth-century world history. With it came the end of the six-hundred-year-old Ottoman imperium, the abolishment of Islamic law, or shari’a, and the cultural transformation of a region spanning from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, from Istanbul to Diyarbakir. The new government adopted the Swiss civil law code, replaced the Arabic script with the Latin one, and ordered the removal of the fez and veil from the heads of its populace. These changes were predicated upon the appropriation of Western modernism as source and inspiration for progression into a new, enlightened Turkish future.

Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic is an important contribution to the study of Turkish architecture at the turn of the twentieth century. In it Sibel Bozdoğan has provided an alternate trajectory for the production of modernity within and outside the usual parameters of European and North American architectural culture. Her work gives another history of modernism, one shared by many non-Western countries, especially those emerging from colonial and imperial legacies of dominance. The case of Republican Turkey, with its top-down implementation of modernity (read by Bozdoğan as “high modernism,” after J. C. Scott), is a good example of how these nations found ways to represent themselves through negotiating a myriad set of visual and architectural devices associated with the modern movement. Therefore, Bozdoğan’s study opens the door for comparative studies across the region, looking at countries such as India or Egypt that shared in the early euphoria of postimperial and postcolonial nation building.

Bozdoğan’s analysis is chronologically and thematically arranged, focusing on the early years of the Republic. She begins the book with the legacy of the “national architecture renaissance,” which consisted of an eclectic revival of Ottoman style within the parameters of new architectural institutions and building types. The attempt at political modernization had already been introduced in the early and middle years of the nineteenth century, when the Tanzimat period saw the employment of a number of Westernizing reforms such as the creation of government ministries and the establishment of laws that guarded equal rights for all. The book continues with chapters that deal in depth with the official discourse through which modern architecture, called “Yeni Mimari,” was introduced in Turkey, and the appropriation of it by nationalist architects. A simultaneous innovation was the emphasis on technological and institutional icons of modernism, such as educational and recreational facilities. The concluding chapters focus on theories of progress and nationalism that surrounded the designing of the “Turkish house” and representative state monuments, such as the mausoleum of Atatürk himself.

The high modernism implemented in Turkey was a legitimate choice for the totalitarian Kemalist ideal, with its six pillars of republicanism, secularism, nationalism, populism, statism, and revolution (57). These systems of government were coupled with a strong belief in the Western model of post-Enlightenment scientific rationality. The ultimate goal was, according to Bozdoğan, a civilizing mission that meant to propel Turkish society into the new century—at whatever cost. The basic problem with this imposition was its foreignness: in Turkey there was no public commitment to modernity as there was in European countries, whose history was intrinsically tied to the history of modernity itself. Here, instead, were “representations of an imported modernity without the industrial, institutional, and economic transformations of building production that made modern architecture possible and plausible in Europe” (192).

It was not until 1883 that the old office of Royal Architects was replaced by the Academy of Fine Arts, modeled after European schools of engineering and architecture. Architectural education was undertaken by European or Levantine architects; their students consisted primarily of Armenians, Jews, Greeks, and Levantines. One of the most profound results of academic training was its appeal to Muslim Turks, who once shunned the profession but now saw in it the legitimation of their social and political values. The architect was no longer just an artist or craftsman, but a person with the agency to affect the historical imperatives of modernity. A contradiction implicit in Bozdoğan’s study is the supposed fascination of Turkish intellectuals with the French Enlightenment and theories of democracy, juxtaposed with their real appropriation of German architectural form. The underlying interest was not, therefore, merely philosophical, but political. After all Turkey entered World War I as an ally of Germany, and suffered for that alliance with the occupation of Istanbul by the Anglo-French army in 1918.

The first architects to build, literally, the Turkish Republic were imported, such as Hermann Jansen, who undertook the master plan of the new capital at Ankara, as well as Bruno Taut, Ernst Egli, and Clemens Holzmeister. They brought with them an image of Westernization that derived its aesthetic from Central European officialdom, with its emphasis on cubic forms weighted with heaviness and monumentality. Although the early builders of Republican Turkey were mostly Europeans, it was their Turkish students who embraced wholeheartedly, and perhaps opportunistically, the rhetoric of Republican modernity. Bozdoğan explores the maturation of the architectural profession and its cooption by the Kemalist regime through the works of Vedat Bey, Kemalettin Bey, and Sedat Hakk Eldem. She highlights the ambiguity inherent in the transition “from an Ottoman-Islamic identity to a nationalist Turkish one” (42) in their built projects. Given their propagandist agenda, in which architecture functioned as representation of state power and ideology, the projects from this period leaned toward a didactic uniformity and homogeneity.

For the Kemalist regime, modernity was equated with Westernization, for as Bozdoğan puts it, “the Republican need for self-affirmation through Western eyes appears to have been central to the cultural and political consciousness of the period” (67). Through that system of rationalizing, all the vestiges of the Ottoman imperial past were negated and replaced by a supposed blank page upon which the new history of the Turkish Republic was to be written. The supreme example of this was the building of the capital Ankara in central Anatolia, perceived as the heartland of the republic. Bozdoğan also explores the manner in which new institutions were formed in the capital and “model” villages, such as girls’ schools and people’s houses. These new institutions furthered the social imperatives of Kemalism, which saw the liberation of women and the education of the masses as a vital component of change.

Bozdoğan’s study is an invaluable contribution to the history of early-twentieth-century architecture in general. She shows that in spite of the rhetoric of early modernism, with its claims to universal ideals, it was appropriated in very distinct ways by totalitarian states such as Turkey. The use of modern architecture as public document by such states represented a break from their debilitating imperial and colonial pasts, and furthered their claims of hegemony and autonomy. In Turkey this architecture was advertised as an ideology centered on democracy and the commonality of all men, which nonetheless was reduced to the superficialities of a monolithic and monumental architectural style. At the heart of Bozdoğan’s analysis is the mutability of modernity itself, and the example of Turkey calls into question the long-held attitude limiting its discourse to Western models. Indeed, at the turn of the century the concept of modernity was just that—a concept, as well as a supposed blueprint for building a progressive future. That this ideal was expressed in the language of Western architecture points to the anxieties of a young nation inventing itself, an insecurity that was shared by many newly independent countries of Asia and Africa. On this matter, the study may have benefited through comparison with Turkey’s Eastern neighbors. The history of Iran, for example parallels that of Turkey, from the birth of new architectural academies in the mid-nineteenth century and the establishment of Westernized constitutional reforms to the cult of personality (in this case, Reza Shah Pahlavi) that ushered the country toward an autocratic view of modernity.

Although Bozdoğan’s study ends in the period following the death of Atatürk, its intellectual and architectural influence goes much further. Throughout the book, which brilliantly brings to life the dynamism and intensity of the early years of the Turkish Republic, there is a simultaneous sense of loss and liberation. With the empowerment inherent in recreating the nationalist image came also the totalitarian suppression of diversity and multiplicity. Turkey’s “new” identity was based on the expulsion of non-Muslims and the containment of any esoteric cultural expression. The effects of Kemalist reforms are felt to this day: young Turks are unable to read documents written a mere one hundred years ago, nor do they have recourse to a religious tradition unhampered by government manipulation. The unexpected victory of a newly elected Islamist governments in Ankara, in 1998 and 2003 mark a reaction to this past, as the populace reclaims its history. Concurrently, the present government tries to negotiate Turkey’s future acceptance into the European Union. This supposed duality is not contradictory, but rather points to the polyvalent nature of modernism itself, which Bozdoğan defines as “a critical discourse that is not only against established stylistic canons but also against authority in general” (298).

Modernism and Nation Building is an important study, whose inclusion in any survey of modern architecture is a necessity. Bozdoğan has given us a glimpse, through the case of early-twentieth-century Turkey, into the manner in which architecture was appropriated in the service of propaganda and nation building. In so doing she has relocated modernism itself within its historical context, while also affirming its role as provocateur in the imagination of visionaries and dictators alike.