Between <italic>Civilization</italic> and <italic>Culture:</italic> Appropriation of Traditional Dwelling Forms in Early Republican Turkey: Fid-Bau Portal

Between Civilization and Culture: Appropriation of Traditional Dwelling Forms in Early Republican Turkey

Nalbantoğlu, Gülsüm Baydar

Modernity outside the West is generally conceptualized with the aid of such dualities as civilization versus culture, international versus national, and modern versus traditional. The first part of each pair is associated with progress, scientific rationality, and westernization; the other signifies historical continuity and local identity. A close analysis of the appropriation of traditional dwelling forms by the Turkish architects of the 1920s and early 1930s renders this perspective problematic and raises significant historiographical issues. First, these architects' use of the traditionalist discourse as a means to assert modernity rather than to counteract it underscores the explanatory power of dualist perspectives. Second, the absence of any critique of modernity, urbanism, and capitalism from the traditionalist position in Turkey renders the latter significantly different from seemingly similar western developments such as the Heimatschutz movement in Germany. Having elitist rather than populist or nationalist overtones, the appropriation of traditional dwelling forms in early republican Turkey was a modernist enterprise committed to internationalism, rationalism, and scientific methods. Such historical moments display the impossibility of providing unilateral explanations for the use of traditionalist vocabularies and call for a deeper understanding of the different manifestations of modernity depending on the particularity of the cultural and architectural context in question.