Abstract
Housing production busied the construction industry in Ankara during the 1920s as the small Ottoman town was transformed into the new capital city of the Turkish Republic. To accommodate the rapidly increasing population, alongside traditional houses, new housing types emerged, and ‘apartments’ were introduced for the first time to the new capital city. The transformation of traditional houses into apartments was not direct but gradual with the duality of historicist facades and modernized interiors and with the ensemble of 'traditional' and 'modern' characteristics. With five apartment cases exemplifying this transformation, this article demonstrates that despite the formal characteristics of the 'national' style, the manifestation of modernization began with technical advancements and changes in the spatial configuration of the housing units. This manifestation is presented by analyzing the technical and spatial characteristics of the selected cases as empirical evidence of modernization of the construction industry and the transforming usage schemes in housing due to the changes in the family structure and sociocultural aspects in the daily lives of the inhabitants of the city. With the introduction of the service spaces within the residential interiors via the retrofitting of infrastructure, with transforming polyvalent traditional spaces into 'defined' spaces and by creating hierarchies in residential interiors with publicity-privacy-based spatial configuration, the new houses constructed fulfilled the requirements of newly modernized families of the 1920s' Ankara.
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Source: Ankara Photograph Postcard and Engraving Collection (0036). Koç University VEKAM Library and Archive, Ankara
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Notes
These exemplary cases are part of a larger documentation and typological analysis and selected as the ideal representatives of the overall apartment production in Ankara during the 1920s; see the doctorate dissertation of Deniz Avcı Hosanlı titled 'Housing the Modern Nation: The Transformation of Residential Architecture in Ankara during the 1920s'. METU Graduate Program in History of Architecture; 2018, Supervisor: Prof. Dr. T. Elvan Altan.
Other apartment-complexes are the First Foundation Apartment ([Belvü Palas], 1926–30), the Second Foundation Apartment (1926–28/30) and the Building & lodgings of the State Railways Administration (1925–28), all designed by architect Kemalettin Bey.
The construction techniques and use of materials are established with a site survey conducted by the author, the Inventory of Koç University, VEKAM Library and Archive and the Inventory of Natural and Cultural Heritage Protection (Doğal ve Kültürel Varlıkları Koruma Envanteri—D.K.V.K.E.) prepared by the General Directorate of Cultural Assets and Museums (Kültür Varlıkları ve Müzeler Genel Müdürlüğü) in 1996 and 2010.
In terms of infrastructural analysis, the apartments are analyzed via the findings of the Inventory of Natural and Cultural Heritage Protection; see Footnote 4.
The plans of the apartments in this study were acquired from the indicated sources below, supported with documents from the archives of Ankara Municipality Directorate of Public Works and documentation through site surveys conducted by the author: (1) Alataş Street No. 1 and (2) Işıklar Street No. 22 (Nalbantoğlu, 1981, 2000); (3) Mevsim Street Nos. 6-8a (Kefu, 2001); (4) the Children's Protection Agency Rental Apartment and (5) the lodgings of the Agriculture Bank (Aslanoğlu, 2010; Sözen, 1984).
Yenişehir Gas Pipe Distribution Document, showing the layout, dated 12.04.1928, with scale and signed, and 'Anschluss Blatt 2' (Gas Connections) annotated (Cengizkan, 2004, pp.45–46).
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the governor of Ankara (Abidin Pasha, 1883–1894) and municipal authorities solved the water supply problems of the city by constructing a plumbing system to carry water from surrounding sources into the city. The municipality agreed with a French engineer for the casting of the iron pipes in 1893, which solved the problem considerably. For more information, see Aydın, et al., 2005, pp.248–263.
The in situ furniture of traditional houses are seki or pabuçluk (platforms where shoes are place when entering a space), yüklük (traditional cupboards), gusülhane (bathing cubicles), sedir (couches, divans), niş (niches), shelves and sometimes ovens or braziers. With the exception of yüklüks and gusülhanes, the others were replaced with movable furniture during the 1920s.
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Avcı Hosanlı, D. Housing in transition: The first apartments of the New capital city, Ankara. J Hous and the Built Environ 36, 1141–1163 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-020-09799-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-020-09799-5