01From the house with a garden to the apartment block: why did Ankara grow upwards?
The first Ankara of the Republic was not conceived as a city of apartment blocks. The Jansen Plan envisaged a sparsely built capital of low houses with gardens, and until the 1950s the common type of dwelling was the detached house. Then the population exceeded every estimate in the plan. Civil servants, members of parliament, officers, doctors, engineers: the middle class of the new capital could not find a home, and when it found one its salary was not enough.
The solution came in two steps. In 1954 an amendment to the Land Registry Law opened the legal way to owning the flats of a building separately. The Flat Ownership Law of 1965 regulated this in full. The middle class, which could not buy a plot and have a house built on its own, could now own one floor. The same law also gave rise to a figure who would shape the cities of the next forty years: the small contractor who gave the landowner some flats and sold the rest, known in Turkish as the “yap-satçı”, the build-and-sell contractor.
Before the build-and-sell contractor took the stage completely, there was a short but brilliant interval. In the second half of the 1950s apartment blocks were commissioned not by contractors but by building cooperatives: people of the same profession or the same institution came together, worked with an architect and, because they were going to live in the building themselves, looked to living rather than to profit. The two apartment blocks of Ankara that are still talked about today are products of this period.
02Two apartment blocks: Hayat and Cinnah 19
The Hayat Apartment Block was built in Kavaklıdere, on a slope where there were vineyards in those years, on a plot of about 5,000 m² obtained by joining several parcels. Its design was drawn by Emin Onat, one of the architects of Anıtkabir; the design was approved in 1957. When Onat passed away in 1961, Nejat Ersin completed the work. Most of the members of the Hayat Building Cooperative, which had the building built, were doctors.
What makes the building important is less its flats than what was conceived around them. A cinema, a club, a patisserie, a school, a children’s playground and shops were planned for the ground and terrace floors of the blocks, which rise on columns. Not all of them could be built, but the club on the ground floor became one of the meeting places of Ankara in the 1960s and 70s. The idea was clear: the apartment block would not be merely homes placed one above another; it would work like a small neighbourhood.
The figures also show where this ambition stopped. The building was designed with two basements, nine standard floors and a terrace floor; because the money ran out, only seven floors could be built. Today it contains four shops, a patisserie, an office, a hairdresser and four flats on each floor. In the original design there was a cinema in the basement, and on the terrace floor a club, a school and a children’s playground. The internal plan of the flats does not appear in detail in the published sources; for this reason we read Hayat through its programme rather than through its plan. That programme had thought of a family’s whole day inside a single building. The one detail we know about the plan is also telling: because the kitchens were found to be small, the balconies were later added to the kitchens. The kitchen, regarded as a service room, proved too small as early as the first generation.
The proper name of Cinnah 19 is the Apartment Block of the Building Cooperative of the Workers of the Directorate of Airfields; it was built for the engineers and architects who worked at the airport. Its architect, Nejat Ersin, designed it in the mid-1950s. While all the buildings lined up along the avenue turn their faces to the road, Cinnah 19 stands at right angles to the avenue; in this way every flat receives the sun and the view. Of its 17 flats, 15 are on two floors. The flats are entered from a semi-open internal street, and every home has a fireplace. On the roof a small swimming pool, sun terraces and a bar were planned.
The section of the building is unusual too: two basement floors below the level of the road, three rows of two-storey flats above, and a terrace at the top. The drawings were approved in 1955; in an alteration in 1958 two more flats were added in the basement. The pool on the roof was also built in 1958, and it was used until 1967.
The inside of the flat is where the habits of the period and a new idea stand side by side. One enters through an entrance; the kitchen and the maid’s room open onto the entrance. After a short passage come the WC, the library and a dining area connected to the kitchen, and beyond it the salon. Up to this point everything is familiar. What is new is the salon itself: one of its sides is glazed from end to end, its ceiling is two storeys high, and the staircase to the upper floor stands in the salon without being hidden behind walls. On the upper floor the bedrooms look onto this void.
A recollection related by Nejat Ersin describes the period well. President Bayar and Prime Minister Menderes, passing in front of the building, stopped, had the architect called and asked for information, and received this with interest when they learned that it was the apartment block of architects and engineers.
And was this building too much for its time? The short answer: it was too much for society, not for its owners; and the parts that became obsolete were its newest idea, the roof pool, and its oldest habit, the maid’s room. The long answer is in the article on Cinnah 19, which takes the building decision by decision, from its section to its flat.
03The other buildings of the same years
Hayat and Cinnah 19 were not alone. From the 1930s to the 1960s Ankara tried housing anew many times: first the house with a garden, then the neighbourhood of official housing built by the state, then the cooperative apartment block, and finally the flat won in a bank’s prize draw. When they are all placed side by side, one sees how the plan changed step by step.
| Building | Year, architect, for whom | Plan and shared space |
|---|---|---|
| Bahçelievler | 1934–39, Hermann Jansen. The first building cooperative in Türkiye; its members were civil servants | Detached and semi-detached houses in gardens. In the middle a school, a post office and sports grounds |
| Saraçoğlu Neighbourhood | 1944–46, Paul Bonatz. Official housing that the state had built for civil servants | 434 flats in 75 buildings, of two to four storeys, in eight different types, from 3 rooms to 5 rooms. A school and a library inside the neighbourhood |
| 14 Mayıs Houses | 1951–53 and 1958–59, Muhittin Güreli. A cooperative of members of parliament and senior officials; about 160 dwellings | First phase: a house with a garden, with rooms opening onto a central hall. Second phase: two storeys, each floor a separate flat |
| Prize-draw houses | From 1948 to the 1960s. Abidin Mortaş, Şevki and Muzaffer Vanlı, Lemi Varnalı. They were won in a bank’s prize draw | First the semi-detached house, and after 1955 the apartment flat. The later examples are of about 90 m²: a salon with a fireplace, two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom |
| Yeşiltepe Blocks | Design 1955, Demirtaş Kamçıl and Rahmi Bediz. A building cooperative | Eight star-shaped blocks, ten storeys, six flats to a floor. The flat is of about 133 m²; the T-shaped salon can be divided with doors. A club and a pool were planned but not built |
| İlbank Blocks | 1957, Fatin Uran | Three blocks set in a stream bed; the tallest building in Ankara in the year it was built |
| University Apartment Block | 1957. The cooperative of the teaching staff of Ankara University | Two blocks; one faces the avenue, the other the street behind |
| 96’lar Apartment Block | 1957–62, Arman Güran. The cooperative was founded in 1956 by employees of the insurance institution | It takes its name from its 96 flats. A single long block on columns; several types of flat for different family structures, some of them split-level |
| Mintrak Apartment Block | 1957–62, Rahmi Bediz and Demirtaş Kamçıl. The cooperative of the engineers and managers of the tractor factory | Seven storeys, four flats to a floor; 28 identical flats for 28 members. The bookcase in the salon and the cupboards in the hall were built in place. Its residents called it “Esat’s Hilton” |
Three things stand out in the table. The first is who had these buildings built: civil servants, members of parliament, university teachers, engineers, doctors. These buildings are the homes of the salaried middle class, that is, of the generation that the republic itself had raised. The second is the insistence on shared space: from the school to the club, from the pool to the patisserie, every project has something outside the home, and in most of them it is the first thing to be cut when the budget tightens. The third is the direction of the plan: an unbroken transition from the house with a garden and a central hall to the flat with a corridor.
The place that shows this transition most clearly is the 14 Mayıs Houses, because the same cooperative had two different plans made seven years apart. In the first houses, of 1951, the rooms open onto a central hall, the “sofa”; the bathroom is beside the bedrooms, and the kitchen is reached by a corridor. In the second phase, of 1958, the central hall has gone and a corridor has taken its place. Each floor is a separate flat, and it contains the following: salon, study, kitchen, maid’s room, two bedrooms, bathroom and WC.
There are two rooms in this list that do not exist today. The study assumes that books are read in the home, that writing is done there, and perhaps that guests are received there for work. The maid’s room assumes that someone who is not a member of the family lives in the home. Today’s flat of the same size has added both of these rooms to the living room.
The plan of Yeşiltepe tries something else: flexibility. The salon is T-shaped, and thanks to two doors placed in its arms the family can, if it wishes, close one arm and turn it into a separate room. In the neighbouring Yıldıztepe blocks this division was made with a permanent wall, and the flats were handed over with three bedrooms. In other words, the same plan could be two different homes for two different families. This is the form, sixty years ago, of the idea presented in today’s housing advertisements as “flexible living space”.
The prize-draw houses, for their part, announce the future. The bank begins in 1948 by giving away houses with gardens, moves to apartment flats in 1955, and in 1960 gives only flats. In a prize-draw apartment block of 1957, flats that would be called 1+1, 2+1 and 3+1 in today’s language are found together in the same building. For the first time the home ceases to be something built to the needs of a family and turns into a product placed in a shop window and ranked by its size. The formula of the residence tower was born here.
All these buildings are experiments. The ordinary Çankaya apartment block of those years, on the other hand, takes the average of these experiments and repeats it unchanged for decades. Let us now look at that average plan.
04The flat of the 1950s: what does the plan tell us?
The easiest way to read this plan is to follow a guest who comes in through the door.
Entrance and hall. The door does not open directly into the salon. First comes an entrance where coats are hung and shoes are taken off, and then a hall. The hall is the reduced descendant of the “sofa”, the central hall of the old Turkish house: all the rooms open onto it. This band, regarded today as “wasted space”, does the most important job in the home: it separates the guest from the rest of the home.
Salon and dining room. The two best rooms of the home stand side by side on the façade facing the avenue, with a glazed sliding door between them. The salon is for guests; the best armchairs, the sideboard and the display cabinet for silver are there, and in most homes its door is kept closed. The dining room, called “salamanje” in Turkish after the French salle à manger, is reserved for large tables. The family, however, usually spends its daily life in another room, the “sitting room”. The largest and brightest place in the home is the place that is used least.
Kitchen. It is on the rear façade, it is closed, and it is a room for work. Beside it is the larder, in front of it the service balcony. The smell of cooking must not reach the salon.
Maid’s room. The small room beside the kitchen is the sociological signature of the plan. In the middle-class and upper-middle-class home of the period, it is assumed that a domestic helper from a village, or a girl taken into the household, will live there. In large buildings the caretaker’s flat in the basement is added to this.
Night hall. The bedrooms and the bathroom are gathered on a separate corridor. The guest never sees this part of the home. The bathroom and the WC are usually separate, so that both can be used at the same time in a full household.
What lies outside the plan says just as much. In the basement there are the coal store and the boiler room, sometimes a shelter; on the roof there is the laundry. The ceilings are higher than today’s, and the balconies are deep enough to sit on. There is wooden parquet or terrazzo tile on the floor, timber joinery in the doors, and on the stairs marble treads and a hand-polished handrail.
05For whom was this home drawn, and for what kind of life?
The Republic’s ideal of the home. The young republic sought modernisation not only in squares and schools; it sought it inside the home as well. The move from the floor table to the dining table, from the floor mattress to the bedstead, from the divan to the armchair was not regarded as merely a change of furniture; it described the daily life of the new citizen. In the traditional house the same room was the sitting room, the dining room and the bedroom in the course of a day. In the new home every activity had its own room: salon, dining room, bedroom, study. The flat of the 1950s is this ideal fitted into an apartment block.
The reception day. To understand the size of the salon, one has to remember the most important domestic institution of the period. On a fixed day of the month the lady of the house receives guests, and all her acquaintances come on that day. The salon is the stage of that day. It is also the room into which the radio, and later the television, came.
Two separate sitting rooms. That is why the home had two places to sit, and the two never mixed. The salon was opened from one guest to the next, its suite kept under covers, and it was left unheated in winter. The family spent its days in a smaller room called the “sitting room”, beside the stove. The first radio and the first television upset this order for a while: on the evening of a match, the news or a film, the household that owned the set opened its door to the neighbours, chairs were carried in and the children sat on the floor. Once every home had a set the gathering ended; the television settled in the sitting room and the salon closed again. Today’s single “living room” is these two rooms merged, with the guest gone.
The quiet continuation of tradition. The plan looks Western, but the habits are local. The separation of the guest from the private part of the home is the continuation, at the scale of the apartment block, of the “selamlık” and the “harem”, the reception quarters and the family quarters of the old house. Shoes taken off at the door make the entrance necessary. The larder for winter provisions, and the tomato paste and pickles made on the balcony at the end of summer, call for a deep balcony.
Why was the door of the salon in old flats glazed, and why was it always closed? The glass is there so that daylight can pass into the hall. It stays closed so that the guest room is protected from daily life; not heating that room in winter is also part of the calculation. Keeping the best room of the home only for others was a habit that seems strange today but was not questioned at all for two generations.
06Yeşilçam: the home that everyone saw
Most people in Türkiye first saw the modern apartment flat in the cinema. The rise of Yeşilçam, the Turkish film industry, falls in the 1950s and its golden age in the 1960s; that is, in the same years as the spread of apartment blocks. In the films, the home is the first sign that tells us who a character is.
In the melodramas two settings stand opposite each other. On one side is the home of the rich family: a large salon, a curving staircase, receptions, the latest household appliances, Western furniture. On the other side is the neighbourhood: the wooden house, the courtyard, the doorstep, the neighbour. The point to which researchers draw attention is this: in these films the modern home is often cold and corrupted, while the neighbourhood is warm and virtuous. The cinema showed, at the same time, both the longing and the unease of a society that was moving into apartment blocks.
Towards the end of the 1970s the setting of the films changes as well; the apartment block and the life of its residents take the place of the neighbourhood. The contractor is the new villain of these films. The story of the family that has its house with a garden demolished and receives two flats in return is lived in the same years both on the screen and in the street.
The mark left by the cinema was lasting. The life we see today in advertisements for residence towers is built in the same language: a large salon, a view of the city, a reception. Only the fashion of the décor has changed. This subject, with its figures, is the matter of a separate article on Yeşilçam.
07What happened in between?
Between the flat of the 1950s and today’s residence tower there is an interval of fifty years, and most of today’s cities were built in that period. After the Flat Ownership Law, production passed from the cooperative to the build-and-sell contractor. Because the contractor’s aim was not to live in the building, his calculation changed as well: the greatest number of flats that fit on the plot, and the greatest number of rooms that fit in the flat.
The social spaces were the first to go; the terrace on the roof became a penthouse for rent, and the club on the ground floor became a shop. The ceilings became lower, the balconies were closed with glass and added to the rooms, and the maid’s room dropped out of the plan. What remained was the three-bedroom flat in which all of us grew up: a corridor, rooms lined up along the corridor, a salon with its door closed. The plan of the 1950s had become smaller, but its habits had been kept exactly.
After the 1980s came mass housing and the housing estate, and in the 2000s the gated estate and the residence tower.
08The residence tower: what does the plan tell us this time?
The word “rezidans” entered Turkish at the end of the 1990s, with a residential tower above a shopping centre in Istanbul, and it became widespread in the 2000s. The word does not carry the general meaning it has in English; in Türkiye it is the name of high-rise, high-security housing that offers hotel services: reception, security, covered parking, gym, swimming pool. Within a short time its meaning widened, and every newly built tall residential block came to be sold under this name. The flats, for their part, are referred to by a formula: 1+1, 2+1, 3+1, 4+1. The first number is the rooms, the second the living room. The home is now described not by the name of a place but by a sum.
Let us read it by the same method.
The door opens into the living room. The entrance has been reduced to a coat cupboard, and the hall has gone. Because circulation space is not counted as saleable area, the plan reduces it to the minimum. The threshold between the guest and the household goes with it.
The kitchen is inside the living room. The maid has left the home, the owner now cooks the meal, and the kitchen has ceased to be a place to hide. An open kitchen makes a small flat look large and saves one wall and one door. The price is that smell, noise and untidiness are now in the living room.
There is no guest room; there is an en-suite bathroom. The plan of the 1950s spent its square metres on the guest; today’s plan spends them on the individual. The bedroom with its own bathroom and its own dressing room is the new “best room” of the home.
The balcony has become narrow. In most flats there is a strip into which a chair barely fits, or only a window that opens. On the upper floors the wind makes this necessary as well.
Social life has moved to the ground floor of the building. Lobby, gym, swimming pool, children’s play area. There is an interesting similarity here: the pool on the roof of Cinnah 19 and the club of the Hayat Apartment Block promised the same thing. The difference is this: in those buildings the shared space belonged to people who knew one another and had the building built together. In the residence tower the shared space is a service, and it is bought with the service charge.
The other members of the formula are drawn on the same logic. As the flat becomes larger, no new idea is added to the plan; the same room is simply repeated once more.
Simplicity in itself is not a fault; a well-resolved 1+1 is a better home than a badly resolved 4+1. The problem lies in the reason for the simplicity. The plan of the 1950s began by describing a family and arranged the rooms accordingly. Today’s plan begins from saleable square metres and, because it does not know who will move in, draws the plainest box that will suit everyone. Everything that the formula does not say, that is, the entrance, the larder, the corner for working, the place where a guest will stay, arrives later on the interior architect’s desk.
These two figures draw the plan of the residence tower as much as the contractor’s calculation does. Families are becoming smaller, the number of people living alone is rising, and the age of marriage is increasing. About half of property advertisements are now for 1+0, 1+1 and 2+1 flats. The flat of the 1950s, drawn for a family of four and a helper, is too large for today’s household; the 1+1 of the residence tower, on the other hand, was drawn for that household.
09Side by side: a comparison of the two homes
| Subject | The flat of the 1950s | Today’s residence tower |
|---|---|---|
| Who had it built | A cooperative or the owner; known by the name of its architect | An investment company; the project is known by its brand |
| Entrance | Entrance and hall; the guest does not see inside | The door opens directly into the living area |
| Living room | For guests; daily life is in another room | The only shared space of the home; everything happens there |
| Meals | A separate room: the dining room | A kitchen island or a corner of the living room |
| Kitchen | Closed, at the rear, with a larder | Open, part of the living room |
| Help | Maid’s room, caretaker’s flat | Cleaning by the hour, estate management |
| Bedroom | Plain; shared bathroom on the night hall | En-suite bathroom and dressing room |
| Balcony | Deep; people sit and work on it | Narrow, or none |
| Storage | Larder, box room, coal store | Built-in cupboards; sometimes a store in the basement |
| Shared space | Stairs, terrace, garden; shared with the neighbours | Lobby, gym, pool; bought with the service charge |
| Neighbours | Known; one knocks on the door | Met in the lift |
| The name of the home | The name of the apartment block: Hayat (Life), Güven (Trust), Yuva (Home) | A formula and a brand: 2+1, “Residence” |
10What they brought, what they took away
We should not be carried away by nostalgia here. The flat of the 1950s was not everyone’s home; in the same years informal “gecekondu” neighbourhoods were growing around Ankara. The earthquake safety of some of those buildings is also a serious problem today; proposals for strengthening are being prepared even for Cinnah 19. To love the old apartment block does not require building it again as it was.
11What do we take from the old plan when we design today?
For our work this is the real question. Bringing back the habits of the old plan is neither possible nor necessary; nobody today wants a guest salon with its door closed. But a few things which that plan knew can be applied even in the smallest residence flat.
- Leave a threshold. 1 m² is enough to keep the whole home from being seen when the door opens: a cupboard, half a wall, a curtain. A place for shoes, coats and parcels keeps the living room from becoming untidy.
- Be able to close the kitchen. Do not be forced to choose between the spaciousness of an open kitchen and the order of a closed one. A sliding glass partition is today’s equivalent of the door of the old dining room.
- Put storage into the plan. A full-height cupboard that takes the place of the larder does more than five pieces of furniture bought later.
- Think before adding the balcony to the room. A place where one can stand outdoors, even if it is narrow, is worth more than the 3 m² gained by closing it.
- Be able to change the use of a room. The greatest mistake of the old home was to lock rooms to a single use; that of the new home is to leave no spare room at all. A sliding door and correctly placed sockets can make the same room a study, a guest room and a child’s room.
- Take those years as an example for material. If a seventy-year-old stair handrail is still beautiful, the reason is that it is solid wood. This is the subject of our article on timeless design.
The seventy years between the Hayat Apartment Block and today’s residence tower should not be read as a story of progress or of decline. Every plan is an answer given to the family, the money and the fears of its own time. What falls to us is not to forget what the old answer knew while we give today’s answer.