Imported but not delivered: the construction of modern domesticity and the spatial politics of mass housing in 1930s' Ankara

Abstract

The social history of the ‘modern house’ in the early years of the Turkish Republic has predominantly been told as the story of the affluent. This group's residential, professional and entertainment culture became a prime marker of modernisation whereas Turkish architectural historians have limited their research largely to the ‘cubic style’ single family houses built for and by the upper and middle classes. But can these models explain the complexity of the ‘modern house’ in 1930s' Turkey? How did architectural layouts, when transferred to different social, cultural and spatial contexts, contribute to the production of gendered divisions? My article adopts domesticity, gender and class as a framework to identify the emergence of ‘indigenous’ forms of modern architecture and urbanism in early republican Ankara. Analysing the Workers' Houses Settlement (1938), I argue that although individual units were characterised by minimalised spatial configurations, the layouts significantly deviated from Western models. Furthermore, by appropriating localised building traditions and living with extended families, lower-income residents shifted the widely disseminated image of the middle-class ideal of domesticity imported from Central and Western Europe, which has become integral to Turkey's official discourse of modernism since the 1930s.