AMBIGUITIES OF TRANSPARENCY AND PRIVACY IN SEYFİ ARKAN'S HOUSES FOR THE NEW TURKISH REPUBLIC

The reality of the city depended as much on these new buildings as Mustafa Kemal's life. This was like a newspaper that nobody knew where it was published, that you never even saw once, but one that everyone else read and recounted to you as a chorus (1). This depiction of Ankara by the contemporary novelist and thinker Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962) reveals the symbolic significance of Atatürk's and his circle's life for the implementation of the revolutionary changes in the new Turkish Republic. Tanpınar's metaphor of the new President's life as an invisible newspaper whose contents were nevertheless perfectly known to the city's population visualizes a particular tendency that held true for the Regime's approach to the making of a new residential culture. The Kemalist elites recognized in the practice of architecture and town planning an effective mechanism for making a modern country. For instance, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, several German-speaking architects and city planners were invited to Turkey, such as Carl Lörcher, Hermann Jansen, Robert Oerley, Clemens Holzmeister and Ernst Egli, to prepare the master plans of major cities and to design state-sponsored institutions. With the schools, hospitals, houses and governmental buildings of these architects, the Kemalist state sought to display the achievements of the Revolution, while subsequently disseminating symbols of modern and Western living to the nation by using a new set of architectural tropes. One of these influential German professionals, the architect and city planner Hermann Jansen reserved the southern hills of Ankara for the upper-class single-family villas in his master plan for the city. Many houses for the new Republican elite were also placed on the hills of Çankaya. I would like to argue in this article that these houses were promoted as emblems of modernization and Westernization, showcased to disseminate a new vision of living to the whole nation, and to exhibit to the rest of the world how the Turkish bureaucrats stripped off their "Oriental" habits. Beatriz Colomina (1998) argued that the most influential houses of the twentieth century have been produced and used also for display, either in the professional exhibitions, or popular department stores, museums and fairs, or propaganda and advertisement. "The modern house has been deeply affected by the fact that it is both constructed in the media and infiltrated by the media. Always on exhibition, it has become thoroughly exhibitionist (Colomina, 1998, 164)." In the case of Turkey, some highly specific houses for the official elite confirm this account, albeit with a specific twist. In addition to their functional use as the living spaces of their owners, these houses can be seen as part of nationalist spectacles, namely the publicity and propaganda techniques of the new Turkish regime. They can be interpreted in terms of a staged modernity. I call them staged, not because the women and men in these houses were acting or because their modern houses were like a decor in a theater. This is in no way to claim that these houses were not "authentic," just because they provided a transformed domestic environment compared to the traditional ones. On the contrary, they were as genuine as any other house, as long as they embodied the aspirations and future ideals of their residents. I call these houses staged, rather because the Kemalist project of modernization in Turkey started with the initiatives of a pioneering group who were on a stage. The lives of this official elite were meant to construct the ego-ideals of a nation, their houses were to establish the new standards of taste. This article concentrates on three of these houses, two of them in Ankara, one in İstanbul, all designed by the Turkish architect Seyfi Arkan (1903¬1966) who had just returned from Germany after working with Hans Poelzig. In a city where the German-speaking architects designed literally all of the state-sponsored institutional buildings of the Revolution, the Turkish architect Seyfi Arkan (1903-1966) stands out as an exceptional example-an architect whose career still awaits scholarly interest. Arkan had a close personal relation with Atatürk, who not only gave the architect his family name (previously Seyfi Nasih), but also suggested a first name for his daughter in a hand-written letter that survived the unfortunate destruction of the architect's archives after his death (Figure 1, 2). The relation between the president and the architect was reinforced during the construction of these three emblematic villas designed for the regime (2). Unlike an historiographical approach that treats architecture only as a transparent and direct mirror image of the economic infrastructure or the political organizations of its context, my intention here is to show the historically and geographically constituted, and even at times incidental relations between ideology and architecture that gets redefined for each specific example. I will not therefore claim that architectural form in the Kemalist Republic was exclusively a fixed reflection of the Kemalist ideology, even if it was highly shaped by it, where the state officials allegedly demanded specific architectural expressions. On the contrary, by focusing on Seyfi Arkan's buildings for the officials of the new Turkish Republic, I intend to show how the specific architectural expression of a certain ideology is considerably the result of the decisions of the architect, who nevertheless shares and is guided by the political ideals of the ideology he aspires to represent. The fact that Arkan's formal approach cannot be neatly categorized with the same terms that define the formal preferences of many of his contemporaries such as Holzmeister and Jansen, to cite two names to be referred to below, will confirm this point.