To Integrate or Not to Integrate?

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Han Tümertekin, SM House,Assos, Turkey, 2006

Turkish architecture over the last 150years has been plagued by itspreoccupation with its integration withthe West. Should it be embracing orreflecting Western cultural, technicaland professional standards? Ugur Tanyeli provides thebackground to this pessimistic contextand describes how a new generationof architects over the last 10 yearshave transcended this predicamentby producing work that turns awayfrom this obsession with identity.

TabanlIIoglu Architects, Sapphireapartment block, Istanbul, 2006– below: Istanbul’s future tallesttower, and one of its mostluxurious housing projects,Sapphire merges the skyscraperwith typical terrace housing units.

Han Tümertekin, SM House,Assos, Turkey, 2006 left: With its blanketing masonryconstruction and steel skeleton,this summer house becomes asemitransparent box.

Ever since the publication of Usul-u Mimari-i Osmani(The Principles of Ottoman Architecture) in 1873 and therise of the Turkish nationalist movement in the seconddecade of the 20th century, every aspect of architecturein Turkey has been focused on the problem of culturalintegration. This has manifested itself in the way bothLate Ottoman and Turkish architecture has concerneditself with its relationship to a definite Kulturkreis – thatis, ‘the First World’, the metropolitan nations, thedeveloped capitalist countries, the modern world. As inalmost every other realm of cultural life, architects havepositioned themselves according to their acceptance orrejection of the modern West. On some occasions this hasbeen openly declared; on others it has been impliedwithin non-architectural discourses and narratives.

The advocates of integration have generally expressedthe desire for architecture to reach required technical andaesthetic standards, providing professional planningservices and applying standardised morphologies in thebuilt environment, hence becoming an integral part of the

‘other’ – the West. Others, however, have based discussions on thepresumption that the Turks should never actually merge with theWest, that they have no choice but to be themselves. Often theproposition is that the Turks should join the ‘other’ but only whileretaining their own identity, culture and values. Fervent defenders ofthis line have a preference for full integration in such areas astechnology, and industrial and organisational capability, with inherentqualities like humanitarian values that ‘make the Turks what they are’ kept intact.

In the 1930s, prominent representatives of the integrationist campincluded Seyfi Arkan (Atatürk’s favourite architect), and from the1960s until his death in 2008 Sevki VanlI was a prolific architecturalwriter of the same group, though he seldom built. On the oppositionfront, both as a theoretician and practising architect, was SedadHakkI Eldem, who was especially influential in the 1940s and stillactive until the 1980s. Turgut Cansever, a three times Aga KhanAward recipient who wrote profusely on architecture and urbanism,was a radical contributor to the nonintegrationist cause in the last twodecades of the 20th century. Without doubt, the majority of thearchitects in Turkey tend to problematise integration even today.

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Emre Arolat Architects, Minicity,Antalya, Turkey, 2004 Minicity is a sort of TurkishMadurodam (the miniature citylocated in Scheveningen, TheHague). It consists of scale modelsof the monuments of Anatolianarchitectural history fromprehistoric times until today. Themain building of the complex is asmall, multipurpose retail space.Arolat here blurs the boundariesbetween architectural planningand landscape design.

It is not easy to discuss the reason why cultural and architecturalintegration was, and still is, traumatic in Turkey. A possibleexplanation is the overestimation of the power of the ‘other’. ToTurks, the Western world appears so economically and culturallypowerful that it is capable of swallowing Turkey up; all the meansand networks of information and communication are controlled bythe West. At least, the image of the ‘other’ in Turkey was drawn inthis way. What made the previous generations of Turks almostparanoid when they were confronted by the partly imaginary (andpredominantly real) cultural hegemony of the West was this unequalrelationship. Thus they pathetically feared they would never be ableto create authentic cultural products and practices, and felt obligedto use and imitate, now and in the foreseeable future, their Westerncounterparts. The atmosphere in Turkey was one of desperation.

This pessimistic context resulted in only reactionary agendasbeing drawn up for modernity and architecture. The architecturalestablishment, which was formed in response to these reactionaryattitudes, beginning in the first decade of the 20th century, wasdeeply involved in creating indigenous and necessarily

identity. In these circumstances, constantly asking the questionsShould we change?, Shouldn’t we change?, How should we change?,Which is the best way to change?, always keeps the matter of identityon the agenda; seeking answers becomes an exercise in self-persuasion, justifying the normality of integration and transformation.For the psyche of society, just as for that of the individual, talkingabout the motives of fear lifts the fear itself. In short, by endlesslytalking on issues of integration, by continuously problematising it, overthe span of almost 150 years, at least an important part of the Turkisharchitectural audience became ready to hear and produce alternativediscourses no longer centred on the subject.

Outstanding Turkish buildings of the past 20 years, if nothing else,have at least demonstrated that the issue of integration has evolvedfrom being merely the psychoanalytical subject of conversation intoarchitectural actuality. Works that have recently been published in theTurkish architectural media show that a certain section of Turkisharchitectural production has finally achieved that all-problematic goalof integration. The majority of buildings published in the national pressare on a par with those in the international architectural media.

anti-integrationist policies. This meant that, for Turkey asfor any other non-Western country, cultural opposition tothe ‘other’ was, and to a limited extent still is, a vital andexistential necessity, and is why even the most ambitiousintegrationists (in Turkey and elsewhere) can seldomexpress a radicalism that simply acknowledges culturaland architectural change. Thus, even the most ardentintegrationists have reservations about transformation,limiting its parameters to an extent that is politicallycorrect. For them, integration with the ‘other’ is a matterof love and hate. As it is, ironically, for those who pitchthemselves against it.

However different the discourses for and againstWesternisation may seem, they are in fact reproducing thesame course of integration. Within a polarity ofaffirmation and denial, what is merely problematised bythem is the modern Turkish identity, not architectureitself. Architecture becomes instrumental in a changingsociety that is trying to overcome the paranoia of losing its

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Without a doubt, some could benefit from thisopportunity. Nevertheless, the problem of integrationremains. As Turks witness success in integration, theymay also realise that they are, in fact, reproducing theirown predicament. Constructing mentally an actuality byconsidering it the ‘other’, while simultaneously wanting toassume otherness by joining it because the ‘other’ and the‘self’ are defined as mirror images, creates a seriouspsychopathological impasse.

Undoubtedly there is a possible though not easysolution to the seemingly insurmountable problem ofidentity: forgetting about the discourses that are centredeither implicitly or explicitly on integration, and startingto rethink architecture by establishing new discourses anddifferent lines of thought. A very large portion of Turkishsociety, however, does not seem ready to leave behindidentity-based discursive practices. The paranoia ofidentity is still an important phenomenon that is expectedto be overcome through the realisation of architecturalworks. For example, a new governmental programme of

courthouse construction has given many Anatolian towns historicistbuildings which propagate ‘Turkishness’. Municipal authoritieseverywhere generally intend to express their political imagination ofnational identity through the public structures they build. Mosquearchitecture seldom produces buildings that cannot be definedstylistically as ‘Turkish’ or ‘Ottoman’. An explanation can be providedwith the reversal and extension of Marx’s much quoted words: alongwith the processes of modernisation ‘all that is solid melts into air’, butthe same processes create a desire to resolidify all that is melted.

Nevertheless, a small but influential group of architects, especiallyin Istanbul and Ankara, ignore this desire and try to go behind theestablished discursive practices. For them, the dichotomy of theEast–West is not a credible or self-evident fact. The 200-year-oldobsession with inherent identities is now under threat from a newunderstanding based on the notion of cultural difference rather thanthe cultural diversity within a binary division of the East and the West.Instead of the coexistence of culturally pure opposites, what isobserved in the world-historical context by them now is a constantproduction of hybridity. This provides the new possibility of enabling architecture to be discussed on its own terms without

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Emre Arolat Architects, Minicity, Antalya, Turkey, 2004

repetitively discussing ideological positions andengagements – at least for a group of architects and their clients.

Among the group of architects who have freedthemselves from the discussions about identity, EmreArolat, Gökhan AvcIoglu, Melkan and Murat TabanlIoglu,and Han Tümertekin are particularly important. All intheir forties, this group forms the younger generation ofTurkish architects. Their works differ in size, content andmorphology. They share, however, the radical denial oftraditionalism and historicism. On the other hand, they allprefer to discuss their works as mere architecturalrealities without theorising them within supra-architectural contexts. On the contrary, they problematiseor simply ignore conventions, especially the ones ardentlydefended by the Turkish architectural establishment.

Without doubt, the best recent work shows the mostradical denials of convention, some of which can bedefined as Deconstructive practices. Tümertekin’s SMHouse in Assos (2006) on the Aegean shore, extensively

published abroad, is an example of this practice: the masonryconstruction becomes a semitransparent skin that does not function asa conventional load-bearing wall, but is born like a continuous sun-breaker shell by the building’s steel skeleton. Here, Tümertekinbrilliantly problematises a traditionalist expectation dominating thewhole of coastal Turkey. TabanlIoglu’s ultra-luxurious Sapphireapartment block in Istanbul (2006–) is equally innovative, merging theskyscraper with typical terrace housing units. All the apartments have acommon garden in front of them, repeating on every three floors. AndArolat’s Minicity in Antalya (2004) is an exercise in blurring theboundaries between landscape planning and building design.

In these works and numerous others, the intentions of the architectshave nothing to do with the obsession with identity, which hasintellectually castrated previous generations. What characterisesqualitatively, not quantitatively, the last 10 years of Turkisharchitectural production is that the producers do not ceaselessly askthemselves ‘Who am I?’. 4

Text © 2010 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 96-7, 98(t) © Cemal Emden; pp 98(b),99 © TabanlIoglu Architects; p 98 (inset) © TabanlIoglu Architects, photo Cemal Emden;p 100-03 © Emre Arolat Architects, photos Cemal Emden

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