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Delineation by the Architecture Office: The İnşaât ve Tamirât Müdürlüğü in the Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic
| This paper presents the design practice at the office of the inşaât ve tamirât müdürlüğü (building and restoration authority) in the Second Constitutional Period of the Ottoman Empire and the first years of the Turkish Republic. This architecture office was responsible for all construction and restoration of public buildings in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. These two periods constituted strongly contrasting – and in themselves anything but stable – circumstances, in which the members of this office carried out their multifarious activities, and in which the buildings designed by them acted on their environment and users. Surprisingly, this shift has left no mark within architectural history. Research undertaken so far relies upon assumptions of cultural and geographical coherence, and neglects the fact that the key actors in these two periods of fundamentally different internal and foreign political challenges were precisely seeking to establish such coherence. This paper claims that in both periods the architecture office was a major actor in these processes of cultural delineation, but in different ways. These shall be investigated using a pragmatist approach that will trace the trajectories of the employees, their workaday choices, and their professional settings and collaborations. This procedure aims at bypassing any pregiven architectural historical themes and fixed geographies that are understood as the result but not the causes of the processes under analysis here.
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