01First a claim: what was private stayed, what was shared was sold
Two things are said about 96’lar: that it was inspired by Le Corbusier’s housing block in Marseille, and that it is Ankara’s first “superblock”. Both are true, and both miss the most interesting side of the building. This is one of the rare examples in which an architect tried to turn the question “how do families live in this country?” into a plan. And the picture that emerges seventy years later is clear: the inside of the flats largely stands as it was; outside the flats, every place conceived for everyone was either never built or later sold.
This gains its meaning when read together with the other buildings of the series. At Cinnah 19 the shared space was a roof pool, and it was left empty after nine summers. In the Saraçoğlu neighbourhood it was a garden, and it lived for seventy years. At 96’lar a third thing happened: the shared space was not left empty; it changed hands.
021956: cooperative, credit and a growing middle class
In the mid-1950s Ankara’s population was rising fast, new public institutions were going up around Kızılay, and the civil servants working in them were looking for homes. Because buying a plot and having a house built alone was not possible for a salaried family, employees of the same institution founded cooperatives and took credit from the state bank. The other buildings of this short period stand side by side in the article that runs from the Hayat Apartment Block to the residence.
The cooperative of 96’lar was founded in 1956 by employees of the Social Insurance Institution; it later took the name Hizmet Building Cooperative. The land consisted of eight plots bought in July of the same year; the plots were later merged. The plans were approved in April 1957, and three months later credit was obtained from Emlak Kredi Bankası, the state housing bank. What followed took long: the German firm that undertook the construction ran out of money, the cooperative was handed over to a group of retired army officers, and construction was completed only in May 1962. Five years from approval to handover.
The chain of cause and effect here is the same in all the cooperatives of the period: a large idea, money that does not suffice, a partnership that changes hands and parts left unfinished. Looking at which parts were left unfinished shows what a society counts indispensable and what it counts ornament.
03Who drew it? A young architect and a measuring rod
The architect is Mehmet Arman Güran; he graduated from Istanbul Technical University in 1953 and undertook the project with the company he founded with two friends. The construction drawings were prepared by Turhan Vural. Güran’s starting point is clear: the housing block Le Corbusier built in Marseille between 1947 and 1952, and his five principles. The mass raised on columns, the ground left free, the roof put to use and the unit of measure of 2.26 m come from there. But in an interview given years later Güran said that his building does not resemble the one in Marseille and that its solutions are different; and he is right, because the real difference is inside the flats.
04The section: a neighbourhood on columns
The plot measures about 105 × 60 m and has an area of 4,579 m². The building is a single prism of eleven storeys running east–west on this plot. It has eight separate entrances and eight separate stair and lift cores; that is, one building from outside and eight apartment blocks side by side from inside.
In the project there were three places belonging to everyone. The ground was left empty between the columns and conceived for shared use. The terrace was for children and gatherings. To the south a three-storey, cylindrical social building had been drawn, to be linked to the block by a bridge and to hold shops and a meeting place. Today there are shops on the ground and four flats on the terrace; the site of the cylinder is a car park.
05The plan: four homes by family structure
The cooperative had asked the architect for flats of two and three rooms. Güran gave something else: four separate types. As reported, three of the types were conceived for three family structures living side by side in the Turkey of those years: the patriarchal, the matriarchal and the modern family. The fourth was added later for those who wanted a home on one level, without stairs. The types run from the single-storey to the split-level set up with half-floor differences, and to those of two and three storeys; all stand side by side and one above another in the same block.
Exactly which room this division placed where is not given in detail in the sources we reached; that is why we do not draw a plan. But the idea itself is clear enough, and it had few equals in its period. In the Ankara of the 1950s the homes of two civil servants working in the same institution were not the same: in one the grandmother and grandfather also live, receiving guests is the most important task of the home, and the living room is kept closed; in the other a young couple works, meals are eaten in the kitchen, and the living room is used every day. Güran had seen that it was wrong to give these two families the same flat.
A plan without corridors. The flats have no corridor; the bedrooms open onto the living room in the middle. This is the sofa of the traditional house: the shared place of the rooms. Inside a modern concrete block stands a plan idea centuries old. It is also what the residents criticise most today: you come through the door straight into the living room, and the way to the bedroom passes in front of the guest. The openness the architect found right for the “modern family” is a loss of privacy for a family used to receiving its guests separately.
Why do we see first a hall and then a corridor when we enter a flat? Because the corridor separates the two lives of a home from each other: what the guest sees and what the family lives. When you remove the corridor you gain square metres and at the same time lose that separation. At 96’lar this exchange was made in 1956; the same debate is held again today in every flat with an open kitchen.
06Decision by decision: well judged, or early?
| Decision | Its relation to the life of the period | What happened? |
|---|---|---|
| Four flat types by family structure | The homes of people working in the same institution really were different from one another | The flats are still in use today; a resident who has lived in a two-storey flat for ten years speaks of her satisfaction |
| No corridor, rooms opening onto the living room | Close to the sofa tradition, far from privacy before guests | It gained space; it remained the residents’ main complaint |
| Open ground on columns | The most expensive floor, left empty in a city where the value of land rose every year | It was filled with 24 shops |
| A terrace for children | A proposal of a garden on the roof for the family that had left the garden | It was closed in with four flats |
| A social building linked by a bridge | The cooperative’s money barely sufficed for the building itself | It was never built; its site is a car park |
| Sun breakers, concrete balcony parapets | Money, and a contractor that changed | Part was not carried out; the parapets were made of metal, and some of the balconies were later enclosed |
| 96 families in a single block | Inexpensive for the cooperative, a new scale for the city | It gave its name to its surroundings; its residents still describe the building as a “block of relatives” |
A line can be drawn in the table. The decisions above the line are inside the flat, and they have held. Those below are outside the flat, and none stands in its original form. The architect’s sociology was well judged inside the home and lost to economics outside it.
07Why is a shared place sold?
To tell the turning of the ground into shops and the terrace into flats as a story of greed is easy and incomplete. Three conditions have to be thought of together.
Money. The cooperative had had difficulty finishing the building. Every square metre that could be sold was a way of closing the debt or meeting the maintenance.
Place. The building is within walking distance of Kızılay. A plot counted as the edge of the city in 1956 became part of the centre within ten years. The void between the columns turned from an architectural principle into a commercial opportunity.
Habit. There was no society that knew what to do with an open ground floor. The garden was known, the street was known; but a shaded void under a building, belonging to nobody, corresponded to no habit of use in the Ankara of those years. A place that is not used is not taken as one’s own; a place not taken as one’s own changes hands at the first offer.
A detail Güran reported in the interview belongs here too: the front façade of the building was changed in a period when his own team was not in charge of the work. The difference between what the architect drew and what was built is not an exception in this building; it is the rule of the period.
08Was it too much for society?
The answer divides in two. The inside of the flat was not too much; on the contrary, it read society better than society read itself. For an architect to ask the client “which family are you?” is something not done in every project even today. Where it went wrong was the corridor: it gave the openness of the “modern family” also to families used to receiving their guests separately.
The outside of the flat, however, was too much; not for society, but for society’s pocket and for the value of the land. Open ground, a roof garden and a social building ask for an institution that will carry their maintenance and cost in common. That institution did not exist. The law regulating the management of shared parts came out only in 1965; the building was three years old on that date.
Even so, something remained, and perhaps it is the most important thing. One resident describes the building as a “block of relatives”; another writer records that neighbours talk on the terraces and at the stair heads and that children play in front of it until evening. Most of the shared spaces went; the neighbourliness stayed. It seems, then, that 96 families sharing eight separate stairs makes a stronger bond than a roof terrace: few doors on each landing, and behind each door a face that is known.
09What did it bring, what did it take away?
Let us return to the opening claim. What was private stayed, what was shared was sold. This is not the architect’s mistake; it is the record of what a society in those years counted as property and what as void. 96’lar is today still full, still lively and still a well-loved building. But what kept it standing was not the shared life that was drawn; it was ninety-six separate homes, each drawn for its own family.