Turkey: Modern Architectures in History

摘要

The international series "Modern Architectures in History" by Reaktion Books examines the twentieth-century modernisms in different cultural contexts. Preceded by the earlier volumes on Finland, Britain, the United States, and Brazil, and followed by the ones on Italy, Greece, and France (forthcoming), this book by Sibel Bozdogan and Esra Akcan provides a masterfully told history of Turkish architecture from the 1920s to the 2010s. The book is organized in three chronological sections covering the periods 1920-1950, 1950-1980, and 1980-2010, and each of these periods is analyzed in three thematic chapters focusing on the urban scene, the public architecture, and the housing trends. These three periods correspond to the major social and political transformations in Turkey: the first one, often defined as the early republican period, was a scene for the emergence of the Turkish nation-state and the ambitious modernization efforts of the nationalist elite under a single-party regime. The second period corresponds to the postwar era marked by popularization of politics and the unprecedented urban sprawl in Turkish cities as well as the wider context of Cold War geopolitics. Finally, the post-1980 era reflects the integration of Turkey's economy into the neoliberal world market and the cultural effects of globalization together with the two challenges to the Turkish political order: political Islam and Kurdish nationalism.