Environmental challenges and developmental angst: Mimarlık and the early environmental discourse in Turkish architecture

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine and contextualise the emergence of environmental thought in Mimarlık, a Turkish architecture magazine, within the period starting with its inception in 1963 until the military coup in 1980. In Mimarlık this brief phase marks the introduction of the basic terms and concepts of environmental discourse. More interestingly, though, it demonstrates the influence of a developmental discourse on the uptake of environmentalism and environmental problems by Turkish writers. In line with the anti-imperialist tendencies of the Turkish left movement in the 1960s and 1970s, environmentalism was dismissed mostly as a ‘Western’ construct or a tool of ‘imperial domination’. As a result, the architectural discourse of the 1970s in Mimarlık paid relatively little attention to the political opportunities the environmental emphasis could bring or to the imagining of a radically different architecture.