Type, Context and Urban Identity in the Work of Sedad Eldem
Sibel Bozdogan
6.2 Sedad Eldem. Halls in various Turkish building types.
Source: Türk Evi Plan Tipleri (Plan Types of Turkish Houses), Istanbul, 1954.
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Documenting Istanbul and the Traditional Turkish House
Following his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul between 1924 and 1928, the young Sedad Eldem embarked on a twoyear tour of Europe. In a recent article I argued that this period of time Eldem has spent traveling and sketching, the “vernacular” was a critical category for him – seen against a formulaic and placeless understanding of modernism and not yet instru mentalized for nationalist ends or Heimatstyle discourses. He sketched houses inspired by very different vernaculars (from white Mediterranean cubes to adobe Central Anatolian houses) in a rich, inclusive palette irreducible to his later codified, exclusive “Turkish House” formula. Like Italian and Catalan architects of the 1930s who found the origins of modernism in Mediterranean traditions, Eldem believed that the vernacular traditions of the Balkans, Anatolia and the Mediterranean were “already modern”.
Two beautiful 1928 sketches of the young Eldem give us a particular insight into his state of mind at the time. The first sketch shows a portico supported by slender columns in a seemingly arid landscape – Anatolia – with a slender woman figure (plate 32). The second one is a distinctly Mediterranean image:
a verandah overlooking the blue sea with an antique broken torso to complete the figure (plate 31). These enigmatic, dreamlike drawings accompany the notes of a young architect imagining about the dreamhouse that he will one day build for himself and his imagined woman. As such, they do invite complex psychoanalytical readings as the personal fantasies of a young Eldem searching for his identity – both personal and cultural – on the margins of Europe. At the same time, they represent Eldem’s quest for a more lyrical, poetic and “situated”
modernism, still connected to the classical and vernacular traditions of architecture in the Mediterranean basin, against the prevailing “machine age”
discourse that informed canonic modernism at the time. This brief exploratory and contemplative period ended with his return to Turkey, and his “Mediter ranean dream” gave way to the Nationalist project of “inventing the Turkish House tradition,” i.e. his wellknown and prolific career. The Mediterranean idea was largely forgotten, with the exception of two unbuilt projects (1941
3This is an earlier article originally published in German in 2000. For a more recent article of mine titled
“Another Sedad Eldem Trope: A Lyrical Anatolian/Mediterranean Modernism Against the Machine Age” (in Turkish), see the two volume publication Sedad Hakki Eldem Ret
rospektif (in Turkish), U.Tanyeli and B.Tanju (eds.), Istanbul, Ottoman Bank Research Center Publications, 2009. These volumes accompany a two part exhibition in Istanbul on Eldem's life and career on the occa
sion of the 100th anniversary of his birth. The parallel publication of Eldem’s early sketches and travel diary (1928–30) has surely given us ample reason to rethink the canonic historiography of the architect.
4For the most recent and complete account of Germanspeaking archi
tects working in Turkey in the early Republican period, see Bernd Nicolai, Moderne und Exil: Deutschsprachige Architekten in der Turkei 1925–1955, Berlin, Verlag fur Bauwesen, 1998.
THE LEGACY OF AN ISTANBUL ARCHITECT 133
and 1976) that diverge from the rest of his canonic work, without however recapturing the brilliance of the 1928 sketches.3
Sedad Hakki Eldem was an “Istanbul architect” par excellence, not only by birth, residence, and work but also by his lifelong commitment to the city’s architectural and urban heritage. He published numerous monographs on individual pavilions, kiosks, and houses of the late Ottoman period as well as a twovolume documentary of engravings and turnofthecentury photographs that he nostalgically titled Reminiscences of Istanbul: The Historical Peninsulaand Reminiscences of the Bosphorus,respectively. These are still the primary resources for scholars working on Istanbul’s urban history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perhaps more significantly, they provide indispensable background material towards a more informed appreciation of Eldem’s own architecture.
To be an “Istanbul architect” was not the most popular thing at a time when the glory and importance of the Ottoman capital was eclipsed by the ethos of Ankara rising as the modern capital of the new Republic. Throughout the early Republican period (1923–50), with which Eldem’s architectural training and early career coincided, Ankara was the primary focus of the new regime in its allocation of funds, privilege, and attention. More significantly, a set of ideologically charged and officially reproduced binary oppositions separated the two cities in the 1930s: Ankara as the new, modern, patriotic, nationalist capital of the “Kemalist Revolution,” and Istanbul as the seat of the old, corrupt, imperial, and cosmopolitan empire. Although Eldem was a distinguished professional committed to and respected by the Republican regime, as the descendant of an elite Ottoman family in Istanbul, he never fully reconciled himself with the populism and revolutionary rhetoric of Ankara. Nor did he have much sympathy for the socalled “Ankara cubic” – a plain, austere Central European modernism introduced to the country primarily by Ernst Egli and Clemenz Holzmeister among other Germanspeaking architects commissioned by the new regime in the 1930s.4
Throughout his career Eldem argued that the most viable sources of a modern but national Turkish architecture had to be sought in the country’s own traditions, in the civic and residential architecture of the Ottoman Empire.
When he was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul between 1924 and 1928, he regarded the historical peninsula in Istanbul as his “real teacher.”
His most important and enduring insight was to approach the Ottoman tradition in a different way than the academic Ottoman revivalism or the “National Style” that dominated architectural education and practice in the 1910s and 1920s. Unlike the latter’s focus on monumental religious buildings and their stylistic and decorative features, Eldem’s interest was focused on houses, residential pavilions, and palaces. Instead of a preoccupation with stylistic motifs and classical composition, Eldem was interested in the plan types and constructional systems of Ottoman residential architecture and in the rational expression of these on the exterior faỗades. For him, this functional, structural, and formal rationality was the defining element of the traditional Ottoman
“building culture,” which manifested itself across different scales, programs, and budgets – from the imperial pavilions of Topkapi Palace to the vernacular wooden houses of the winding streets and poorer districts of Istanbul’s historical neighborhoods. His earliest sketches of wooden houses and beautifully rendered drawings of the imperial pavilion (Hünkar Kasrı) attached to the seventeenthcentury mosque, Yenicami, bear testimony to his intuitive feel for a basic “type” that was going to be the primary focus of his lifelong pedagogical
and professional program (plate 30). The wide overhanging eaves, modular repetition of windows, and the projection of the upper floors above a solid base captured in these early drawings would gradually and systematically find their way into Eldem’s own work, becoming his trademark.
After more than half a century since its conception, Sedad Eldem’s idea of a
“modern” but distinctly “Turkish” architecture still offers the most theoretically elaborate program for reconciling tradition with modern architecture. His primary legacy is the theorization and codification of the “Turkish house” as a particular “type” and a recognizable “cultural artifact” spanning a time frame of about five hundred years and spread over the vast territories of the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia and the Balkan provinces. For Eldem, the most elaborate examples of the type are located in Istanbul and although many regional variants exist, certain constant characteristics make it a distinct type. These characteristics are the lifting of the main floor above a service/storage floor on the ground, a clear differentiation between the rooms (upper floor projections supported by brackets) and circulation spaces, rows of windows reflecting the timber frame structure and finally, a tile roof with overhanging eaves. Numerous examples of these traditional houses were studied and documented by Eldem’s students in the National Architecture Seminar, which he established at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul in 1934 and turned into a major institution with formative influences on an entire generation of young architects. Eldem’s own Türk Evi Plan Tipleri(Plan Types of Turkish Houses) published in 1954 and his monumental Türk Evi(Turkish House), initially conceived in five volumes, the first of which was published in 1984, are based largely on the work of the National Architecture Seminar.
In Türk Evi, Eldem provides an elaborate typological matrix of house plans based on the shape, configuration, and location of the hall (sofain Turkish), the main access space of the traditional house. The three generic types of houses are those with external halls, with internal halls, and with central halls, with the possibility of derivative connected types. For example, in Eldem’s schema, even the grand imperial palaces in Istanbul like Dolmabahỗeand ầıragan (which have highly eclectic faỗades of neoưclassic and neoưIslamic elements, respectively) are in fact elaborate versions of the same basic plan type, repeating it along an axis parallel to the Bosphorus. In other words, for Eldem, plan type has a primacy over style and represents continuity even when styles change. There is also a roughly chronological basis to Eldem’s classification.
The external hall type is the earliest form (with some surviving examples from the seventeenth century), more common in Bursa, Edirne, Kütahya, and other early Ottoman cities, in which the sofais an open terrace connected to the garden or courtyard. With the addition of rooms and the closing off of the external hall in the eighteenth century, especially in response to the urban conditions of Istanbul, the internal hall type was developed and was sometimes designated as the karnıyarıkplan (literally “split belly”). The most elaborate variant of the same idea, the central hall type, proliferated in the nineteenth century, and with the arrival of Baroque influences upon the tastes of the Ottoman elite, ovalshaped central halls became popular, especially in the Bosphorus yalıs,which had formative influences on Eldem.
In the 1930s, when the term “international style” was anathema to the passionately nationalist climate in Turkey, most of Eldem’s Turkish friends and Germanspeaking colleagues argued that good modern architecture, which responds to its context, was, by definition, “national” in an unselfconscious way.5Eldem, who was the leading proponent of a “National Architecture
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5Especially as expressed by Bruno Taut’s famous words: “All nationalist architecture is bad but all good architecture is national.” See Bruno Taut, Mimari Bilgisi(Architekturlehre), Istanbul, Academy of Fine Arts Publications, 1938, p. 333.
6.3 Sedad Eldem. Plan and model of intervention on Beyazit Square, Istanbul, 1938.
Source: Courtesy of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Geneva.
6.4 Sedad Eldem. Plan of the Faculty of Sciences and Literature, Istanbul University, 1942.
Source: Courtesy of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Geneva.
Movement” in those years, proposed the corollary argument that in its simplicity, formal rationality, and structural logic the traditional Turkish house was “already modern.”6In other words, Eldem’s appreciation of tradition was not for the sake of positing the traditional against the modern, but rather for showing the profoundly “modern character” of traditional buildings and ultimately arguing for their validity and applicability towards a modern Turkish architecture. In fact, he openly admitted to having “discovered” the Turkish house in Europe in the late 1920s, after seeing the Wasmuth publication of Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie houses and looking closely at Le Corbusier’s idea of lifting the house on pilotisabove the ground floor level.7
At the same time, the traditional wooden house was by no means the only source of inspiration for Eldem. He also deeply admired the monumental stone architecture of Central Asia, prehistoric Anatolia, and Ottoman monuments, not for their decorative programs, but for what he saw as “the beauty of their
6Eldem wrote: “The traditional Turk
ish house is remarkably similar to today’s conceptions of the modern house. Ample windows and light, free plan, priority of comfort over ostentatious display, honesty of materials, the relationship of the house to nature through terraces, courtyards and gardens. Aren’t these the very qualities we look for in a modern house?” See Sedad Hakkı Eldem, “Türk Evi” (Turkish House), in Sedad Hakkı Eldem: 50 Yıllık Meslek Jübilesi, Istanbul, Academy of Fine Arts Publications, 1983, p. 19.
7The irony of which is the fact that, as many scholars point out, it was the wooden Turkish house that had formative influences on Le Corbusier’s search for a “modern vernacular,” culminating in his Villa Savoye of 1929. See Francesco Passanti, “The Vernacular, Modern ism and Le Corbusier,” in Journal of Society of Architectural Historians56, no. 4, December 1997, pp. 438–451;
and Adolf Max Vogt, Le Corbusier:
The Noble Savage, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1998.
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6.5 Sedad Eldem. Main faỗade of the Faculty of Sciences and Literature, Istanbul University, 1942.
Source: Courtesy of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Geneva.
8Doğan Kuban, Istanbul: An Urban History, Istanbul, Turkish Economic and Social History Foundation, 1996, pp. 368–369.
9See Zeynep Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1986.
THE LEGACY OF AN ISTANBUL ARCHITECT 137
structure, space and massing.” In the 1940s, these latter influences, combined with his admiration for the New German Architecture exhibition brought to Turkey by Paul Bonatz in 1943, unfolded in his work as a more monumental and overtly classical tendency, conforming to the nationalist cultural politics of the time. It was only after the dramatic transformation of Turkish politics and culture in the 1950s that Eldem dropped the term “nationalist” to designate his work and appropriated the term “regionalist” instead.
Building on the Historical Peninsula
Until as late as the midtwentieth century, Istanbul’s historic peninsula was characterized by a dense urban texture of houses and gardens punctuated by the contrasting scale and public character of imperial mosques, baths, and bazaars. Photographs reproduced in Eldem’s Reminiscences of Istanbultestify to this tightly knit relationship between the more anonymous fabric and the larger monuments. In such areas as around Hagia Sophia, houses were literally huddled against the monuments before the nineteenthcentury Ottoman modernizers cleaned and opened up the area around the mosque. In his recent urban history of Istanbul, Doğan Kuban argues that until the nineteenth century, public urban space did not exist in Ottoman and Islamic planning concepts and that the private was always more important than the public, which was “a residual space.”8Whether this argument is historically accurate or not, it is well known that the modernization of the city in the late nineteenth century introduced efforts to open up urban spaces along European models and small
scale interventions to regularize the street patterns.9These new “European aspirations” of the Empire also brought proposals for “grand projects,” like the French architect Bouvard’s unimplemented 1902 scheme to reorganize Beyazit Square in a manner utterly alien to culture and topography.
Sedad Eldem’s 1938 project for a small urban intervention for the same Beyazit Square can be read as a critical statement against the very idea of the “grand project” and in favor of restoring the historical character and scale of the Ottoman urban space. In this proposal, the walls of the Beyazit Mosque are restored; the medreseon the opposite side is surrounded by small shops in an
6.6 Sedad Eldem. Site plan, Istanbul Palace of Justice, 1948.
Source: Courtesy of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Geneva.
10[Editor’s note] During the Ottoman period, the medresewas a superior school or even university, located in the immediate surroundings of the mosques. These were not only reli
gious complexes but also genuine centers of social life, which also grouped hamans, libraries, collective kitchens, etc.
11Sedad Hakkı Eldem, 50 Yıllık Meslek Jübilesi, p. 21.
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assembly of narrow streets and courtyards with a small yet prominently located coffeehouse.10The latter is a recurrent type in Eldem’s career, repeated in the Çamlıca (1941) and Tacşlık(1948) coffeehouse projects. Although for Eldem, the idea of the city is associated with notions of order and discipline (hence his play on the word polis as both “city” and “police”), what he advocated was a specific order distilled through history and culture, not superimposed on the city in a grand gesture.11On the other hand, this sensitivity to the scale and history of the medreseis compromised in the Beyazit Square proposal by the vehicular traffic cutting through the square – a gesture of modern urbanism that can be seen as a reflection of the contradictory undercurrents in Eldem’s thinking.
His first major built project on the historical peninsula is the Faculty of Sciences and Literature of Istanbul University (1942–43), designed in collaboration with Emin Onat (1908–61) and at the height of Eldem’s close relationship with Paul Bonatz. The scheme is conceived as a system of quadrangles and open courtyards that were labeled as “tacşlık“ to highlight the analogy to the stone
paved courtyards of traditional houses. The site plan illustrates a sensitivity to the historical context, especially the relationship of the main entry block along Ordu Caddesi to adjacent historical structures – the Beyazit Bath (hamam) and the Hasan Pasa Medrese with a stepped “inner street” between them culminating at the fountain (sebil) of the medrese. The two monumental faỗades of the scheme are arranged at right angles along the two main avenues to give a more urban and institutional faỗade to them. In contrast, the scheme “opens
6.7 Aboveand Below: Sedad Eldem. Panoramic elevation of the project within the context, and site plan, Social Security Administration Complex, Zeyrek, Istanbul, 1962–64.
Source: Courtesy of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Geneva.
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up” at the back with a series of courtyards and open spaces towards the Vezneciler Caddesi, beyond which an old neighborhood was designated for preservation.
The entire project is the first largescale demonstration of Eldem’s nationalist agenda – a translation of his “Turkish house” paradigm from the residential scale to the scale of a monumental institutional building. The main faỗade of the building along Ordu Caddesi is particularly illustrative: it is an elongated version of Eldem’s traditional Turkish house, blownup in scale and lifted above a monumental colonnade on the ground level, making clear allusions to Paul Bonatz’s Stuttgart Railway Station (1912–28). The materials and faỗade characteristics of the building – especially the alternating layers of brick and stone along the Recşit Paşa Caddesi elevation and in the courtyards – replicate the traditional Ottoman walling techniques that Eldem had studied as a student.
The next project, the Palace of Justice (1948–71), which engaged Eldem on and off for more than twenty years, is located in the heart of the historical peninsula
6.8 Yalıhouses.
Source: A.I. Melling, Voyage Pittoresque de Constantinople et des Rives du Bosphore, Paris, 1819. Author’s collection.
on the Sultanahmet Square, in close proximity to major Byzantine and Ottoman monuments. It was designed in collaboration with Emin Onat as a competition entry in 1948, with Paul Bonatz as a member of the competition jury. What is urbanistically significant is the response of the scheme to its overpowering historical context in terms of scale and silhouette. The concern for the Sultanahmet Square elevation is evident on the drawings, especially in the careful adjustment of the roofline of the scheme behind the historical Ibrahim Paşa Palace on the square. The faint superimposition of the outline of the Blue Mosque on this elevation suggests an effort not to raise the new scheme above the level of the mosque’s dome system. From this initial scheme, only the long backbone of the project behind the Ibrahim Paşa Palace was built, containing offices and courtrooms. The two larger blocks towards Divanyolu were not built when construction was interrupted due to archeological finds excavated on the site. Much later in 1978, Eldem proposed to raise the blocks above the level of the excavated ruins and to shelter the excavated Byzantine rotunda and church under light structures like a geodesic dome and a tent structure, respectively. These later (and unrealized) proposals are interesting, if not as successful for Eldem, as evidence of the profound problems of building in historical areas with layers of urban archeology to be reckoned with. In that respect, Istanbul, like Rome, is a “collage city” par excellence, and the multi plicity of layers (from Roman and Byzantine to Ottoman and Republican) complicates the issue of what exactly constitutes the city’s urban identity.
Finally, the most acclaimed “contextualist” scheme of Eldem on the historical peninsula is the Social Security Administration Complex in Zeyrek (1962–64), the winner of a prestigious Aga Khan Award in 1986. The site is in close proximity to the Roman aqueduct and the Byzantine church of St. Pantocrator and is surrounded by one of the few remaining traditional neighborhoods of Istanbul, with its narrow streets and vernacular wooden houses. The complex of offices and shops are situated on a triangular lot where the Zeyrek slope meets the Atatürk Boulevard that was cut through the fabric in the 1940s. A two level
“interior street” running parallel to the boulevard constitutes the spine of the project. Blocks of different sizes and heights are attached to this spine,
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