Twentieth-century Istanbul rises on an area that was formerly occupied by the capitals of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. Their manifold past had culminated in the classical Ottoman city of wooden houses and religious and civic monuments in masonry that were lining winding streets and cul-de-sacs. However, the traditional city of Byzantine and Ottoman tour de forces, such as Hagia Sophia and the Süleymaniye Mosque, which had already been spreading beyond city walls, began to change in the 19th century. Then, the sporadic regularization attempts of the street pattern were facilitated largely by frequent fires that often left whole neighborhoods desolate. Some other contemporaneous developments were the construction of huge military barracks, bringing a much larger scale and a regular geometry to the traditional organic city, and the flourishing of new building types and materials, as in the case of masonry palaces and apartment buildings where European architectural styles, such as Neoclassicism, were employed. All these were the consequences of the Ottoman reform attempts initiated in the 18th century with the gradual weakening of the empire. By the 18th century, the Ottomans had started to appropriate European models in military, legislative, and social matters. Those attempts ratified the unique position of Istanbul as a city between the "East" and "West" by exposing it to powerful Western influences. Accordingly, an oscillation between the universal (that meant European) and the local shaped the architecture of Istanbul in the first half of the 20th century.

At the turn of the century, Istanbul was a cosmopolitan city of about one million people, with Greek, Armenian, Jewish, Bulgarian, and European inhabitants in addition to the Muslim population. Among the diverse, eclectic, and historicist examples in which foreign and non-Muslim Ottoman architects combined pseudo-Islamic and Ottoman facade features with Beaux-Arts plans and new building types, one imported architectural style actually fit with local building traditions. Until the 1960s, when they were beginning to be demolished, Istanbul had the largest number of Art Nouveau buildings of any city in the world. Italian architect Raimondo D'Aronco had arrived in the city in 1893 to design the pavilions for the Ottoman Agricultural and Industrial Fair, which was later canceled because of the disastrous earthquake in 1894. D'Aronco, instead, worked as the architect in charge of the imperial palaces and directly in the service of the sultan until 1909. During his sojourn, besides many government buildings and annexes to the sultan's residence at Yildiz, he designed numerous villas, fountains, apartment buildings, and even a small mosque. In many of these projects, such as the Seyh Zafir Tomb (1903-04), he achieved a refined reinterpretation of Ottoman architecture that he combined with a modernizing Art Nouveau sensibility. Both the apartment buildings he designed for the Pera district, where inhabitants were mainly European and Levantine, and his yalis (wooden, waterfront mansions) along the coasts of the Bosphorus were part of the fin-de-siècle Art Nouveau frenzy in Istanbul.

Many non-Muslim Ottoman architects contributed to the spreading of Art Nouveau with their apartment and office buildings and particularly with villas and yalis on Buyukada (one of the nine Princes' Isles on the Marmara Sea) and the Bosphorus until the 1920s. The latter were singular syntheses of Ottoman wooden house types and techniques with Art Nouveau details that, since then, became part of the image of Istanbul. That period coincided with the emergence of a nationalist reaction to the European architects working in a historicized, eclectic language, as in the case of the pseudo-Oriental Sirkeci Train Station (1890) by A. Jachmund and the Frenchified, neo-Renaissance Haydarpasa Train Station (1909) by Otto Ritter and Helmuth Cuno. Probably under the influence of the ideas of the Young Turks movement, two Turkish architects, Vedat Tek and Kemaleddin, started to employ Seljukid and classical Ottoman features in their architecture to achieve stylistic unity vis-à-vis the eclecticism of the foreign architects, who randomly combined different so-called Islamic styles. Tek and Kemaleddin thus became the harbingers of a historicist architecture that has come to be known as the First National Style.

Particularly in the examples where they tried to bring together new building types and materials with historical features, the "Turkishness" of their architecture remained at the level of the surface treatment. Nonetheless, in the projects where the preoccupation with the past was relatively suspended, as in Tek's own residence (1914) and Kemaleddin's Harikzedegin Apartment Complex (1922), built for the victims of the 1918 fire, they produced examples of sophisticated architecture. The former is an elaborate synthesis of Ottoman residential architecture and an almost Wrightian modernism, whereas the latter is one of the first reinforced-concrete apartment complexes in the historic peninsula with communal service facilities, courtyards, open staircases, and stores introducing a new type vis-à-vis the inward-looking, Turkish house.

The Harikzedegan Apartment Complex was built during the Allied occupation of Istanbul while the War of Independence was being fought after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, alongside Germany, in World War I. The victory in the War of Independence led to the abolition of the surviving institutions of the empire and the proclamation of the Turkish Republic. That change in the regime brought the change of the capital as well: in 1923, after 1600 years, Istanbul lost its status as a capital to the central Anatolian town of Ankara. The aim was to dissociate the new state founded on Turkish nationalism from the cosmopolitan, imperial heritage of Istanbul. Accordingly, during the first decades of the republic, a vast building program was undertaken in Ankara while the construction activity in Istanbul stayed meager. In accord with the republican elites' preference of an international architectural language, however, some modernist projects were realized also in Istanbul. These include the purist Presidential Summer Residence (1935) by Seyfertin Nasih Arkan, a pupil of Vedat Tek, who has also worked with Hans Pockzig, and the Observatory of the Istanbul University (1936), which combines a horizontal, modern exterior with the traditional Ottoman cruciform plan, by Hikmet Holtay.

In the first decades of the republic, the demand for great numbers of architects was tried to be met by both sending Turkish students to Europe for training, mostly to Germany because of the cultural pacts signed with this country, and inviting European architects, again mostly Germans, to teach at the two architecture schools in Istanbul. From the 1930s to the end of the 1950s, Ernst Egli, Bruno Taut, Clemens Holzmeister, and Paul Bonatz, among others, taught either at the Academy of Fine Arts, the first architecture school of the country founded in the 19th century, or at Istanbul Technical University, the Engineering School, which in the 1920s started to give the degree of architecture as well. Although the teaching activities of these architects deeply affected Turkish architectural discourse and education, the majority of their architectural activities remained confined to Ankara. Taut's Istanbul residence (1936) is one of the exceptions: it displays both Turkish and Japanese influences in a building set on a cliff overlooking the Bosphorus and is daringly carried by four pillars, two of which are 10 meters high. Both Taut and his predecessor, Egli, while teaching modern, rational principles of design at the Academy of Fine Arts, also gave support to a seminar on national architecture founded to study the characteristics of Turkish architecture. In the 1940s, that course, also in accord with the resurgence of nationalism in Europe, fueled the second spate of National Style, the major proponents of which were Sedad Hakki Eldem and Emin Onar.

This time, the main source of inspiration was Anatolian vernacular architecture, particularly the Turkish house, on which typological studies were undertaken under the supervision of Eldem at the Academy. Eldem, who contributed extensively to 20th-century Istanbul through his numerous projects, is one of the shapers of Turkish architecture of the century, Although his Taslik Coffee House (1948) is a typical example of the Second National Style, his collaborative project (1952-84) for the Hilton hotel chain together with the American firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill disclosed the shift in trends: International Style was becoming the dominant architectural paradigm together with the rampant American influence in the cultural sphere. In the 1950s, with the change from an ascetic cratism to a populist liberalism, political authorities' interest in Istanbul was renewed. Extensive demolitions were undertaken to make space for boulevards, which could only partially be justified by the pressing needs of a growing metropolis leading to Istanbul's nascent (now uncontainable) internal migration problem. The immense rate at which the city, whose population as of 2002 was about 10 million, grew resulted in the squatters and rather stale apartment blocks that wrap the city today. That, on the other hand, does not mean that attempts to solve the housing problem were not made, as in the case of the Levent settlement (begun in 1947) and the Acaköy satellite town (begun in 1957), both architecturally fine examples that nevertheless could not live up to the ideal of providing housing for low-income families.

After the waning of the International Style and the pluralistic architecture of the 1960s and 1970s—exemplified in the organic apartment building of the 1960s by Nezih Eldem; the Brutalist Retail Shop Complex (1959) by Tekeli, Sisa, and Hepgüler; and the contextualist Social Security Complex (1970) by Sedad Hakki Eldem—Istanbul, since the 1980s, has been characterized by a new type of international architecture: that of the faceless shopping malls, high-rise office buildings, and international hotel chains. On the other hand, the newly awakened interest in the Ottoman past, while helping to develop a consciousness for the protection of the historical heritage, reveals itself also in the rather superficial trappings of luxurious housing. At the end of the 20th century, Istanbul is a world city, displaying all the problems of megalopolises: environmental pollution, heavy traffic, shortage of quality housing, and spreading squatters. Among all these, it still retains remnants of its age-old beauty to which projects by both old and young generations of architects, such as Turgut Cansever (with his jali restorations and Anadolu Club Building (1951) on Buyukada) and Nevzar Sayin (with his Gön Leather Factory (1995)), have been and are still contributing.

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Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture,Vol.2 (G-O).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.

INTERNAL LINKS

FUTHER READING

There is no single scholarly source devoted to the architecture of 20th-century Istanbul. The architectural guide by Beck and Forsting is the first attempt to compile a list of 20th-century buildings in the city.

Barillari, Diana. and Exio Godoli, Iaanbul, 1900: Archicettura interni Art Nosean, Florence: Octavo, 1996; as Istanbul, 1900

Art Neurea Architezure and Interiors, New York: Rizzoli, 1996

Beck, Christa, and Christiane Forsting, Isanoid: An Architectural Guide, London: Ellipsis, and Cologne: Könemann, 1997

Bozdogan, Sibel, Suhx Orkan, and Engin Yenal, Sodad Eldem: Architect in Turkey, Singapore: Concept Media, and New York: Aperture, 1987

Holod, Renata, and Ahmer Evin (editors). Modern Turkish Architecture, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984

Kuban, Dogan, Istanbul, an Urbyn History: Bycantion, Constantinopola, Inanbul, Istanbul: Economic and Social History Foundation of Turkey, 1996

Sey, Yildiz (editor), 75 pilda degisen kent ve mimarlik, Istanbul: Türkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakfi, 1998

Tekeli, Ilhan (editor), Danden bagine Itanbul anniklopedisi. 8 Vols., Istanbul: Kültür Rakanligi, Tarih Vakfi, 1993-95

Yücel, Arilla. "Contemporary Turkish Architecture," Mimar, 10 (October-December 1983)

Turkey: A Traveller's Historical and Architectural Guide