In standard architectural history surveys, the British Museum is portrayed as an example of nineteenth-century “neoclassicism”, or the “Greek revival.” Usually cited as among the motive factors in this revival are the writings about European travels and archaeological explorations in the then Ottoman lands of ancient Greece, as well as a general interest in Hellenic culture. Yet the cultural and architectural appropriation of the Hellenic is not analyzed in relation to the possible ties and tensions between European archaeological culture and the Ottoman response to antiquity. This paper is an attempt to align the British Museum’s “Arcadia in Bloomsbury” with the Ottoman Imperial Museum, Müze-i Hümâyun, in İstanbul, and to look at them afresh beyond the usual discourse of style. The paper analyzes the “neo-Grecian” “Temple of Arts and Sciences” in London, supposedly inspired by those in Priene and Teos in the Ottoman Empire, and the Müze-i Hümâyun, whose façade allegedly replicates the Sarcophagus of the Mourning Women, transported to the museum from Sidon in Lebanon by Ottoman officials, understanding them as charged manifestations of “correspondence” or “transfer” within the web of circulating ideas, models, ancient remains, travellers, and architects of the nineteenth century.

This study is part of a larger project on the Landscapes of the Eastern Question, contextualizing the architecture of diplomacy in İstanbul as a symbolic and material refraction of changing power balances and representational strategies. In Beyoğlu, where most of the main diplomatic residences were located, the embassies were originally Ottoman wooden konak structures, but, in time, the increasing influence of Russia, Great Britain and France fostered their monumentalization and the adoption of European academic classicism. By contrast, the summer embassies on the European shore of the Bosphorus remained largely local in terms of technology, image, materials, and spatial layout until the end of the Ottoman Empire. The paper argues that, for many diplomats, a stately winter residence representing national identity, along with a summer house in the spirit of the local traditions, would be used as a communicative and performative resource in the drama of European-Ottoman relations. It also evaluates foreign settlement on the northern shore of the Bosphorus as conforming to a strategy of surveillance and control in keeping with the strategic relevance and contested status of the straits.

In the 1930s, the attention of Turkey’s politicians shifted back from Ankara and Anatolian cities to İstanbul. In 1932, the Governorship-Municipality of İstanbul organized an urban design competition for İstanbul, and four foreign city planners were invited. In the meantime, Martin Wagner came to İstanbul for the preparation of urban reports. In 1937, Henri Prost, the prominent urbanist of Paris, was invited to İstanbul and prepared the first master plan of the city. In Turkey and in İstanbul, town planning processes have been significantly influenced by “Western” planning principles, cultures, and experiences while gaining a local meaning in the context of Turkish politics and the state-formation process. The aim of this study is to describe the urban design competition of 1933 and the first master plan of 1937. Beyond references to Western European cities as in the “city-beautiful” planning approach, this study, based on a series of official documents, plan reports and their rhetoric, investigates in particular the role of foreign planners/urbanists in İstanbul in the context of the construction of a nation-state. The analysis of these foreign planners’ work suggests that urban planning in Republican Turkey was closely linked to the construction of the nation state.

This paper represents an attempt to reflect on the Turkish identity in the formation period of the Republic, from its constitution in 1923 until 1939. The discussion is focused around two buildings that were constructed in 1939, both of which were built abroad to represent the new state; the Embassy of Turkey in Tehran and the Turkish pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. These buildings were both featured in the same issue of the architectural magazine Mimar, and offer a fruitful starting point for delving into historical and theoretical issues in identity discourse. That said, the paper goes beyond merely analyzing the different formal vocabularies and personalities of the different architects and patrons involved in commissioning these structures. Rather than addressing only the different cultural and architectural responses to the contemporary national identity debate, the paper will also consider the question of whether the host countries and the addressees of these rather symbolic buildings also had a role in their design and evaluation stages. In other words, the study aims to understand how representation in a location in the “West” or in the “East” affects the identity of a nation characterized by its duality of “West” and “East.”

This paper focuses on two exhibitions of architecture and town planning held by Britain in Turkey in the mid-1940s. The use of these exhibitions for propaganda purposes, as well as their reception in the highly politicized context of World War II, requires the study to emphasize the political as well as the professional perspective of the contemporary architectural context. Analyzing why and how these exhibitions were held, and what they displayed as representative of British architecture and town planning, the paper discusses the characteristics of the contemporary discourses and practices of the profession with reference to the national dynamics of each country and their position in the international scene at the dawn of a new era in world history. The aim is to question the relations of power that are conventionally taken to define discursive and practical hierarchies of binary constructs, such as national/international or traditional/modern. Examining the case of the British exhibitions in Turkey, the paper emphasizes instead the necessity of a comparative analysis to evaluate the architectural products in-between or beyond dichotomies as produced in discrete yet interconnected contexts.

The discourse of postwar modern architecture is dominated by historical accounts that easily describe the processes of modernization in Turkey during the Cold War as a unilateral flow of ideas and expertise from the United States. Yet, the relation between benefactor and beneficiary is much more complex. This article explores culture production as a state function and intellectual practice through which bureaucrats and intellectuals representing the state agencies disseminated Americanism as common sense in postwar Turkey. Drawing on the cultural activities of two parallel organizations, the Turkish Information Office (TIO) acting in New York and the United States Information Service (USIS) in Turkey, it illustrates how the intricate relations among ideology, politics, and architecture affect the practices of bureaucrats and their audiences in the process of culture production. Promoting ideologies of Americanism, these organizations simultaneously popularized American architects and their buildings to their audiences. The comparative analysis of two case studies, the photo book Talking Turkey by the TIO and the Architecture Series of the Voice of America Forum Lectures, demonstrates how the division created between information and culture as two separate functions of foreign diplomacy perpetuated similar divisions in architectural discourse such as the iconic and the ordinary.