01First a claim: neighbourliness is made by the threshold, not by the facility
Those who design collective housing often try to solve shared life with a facility: a club, a pool, a games room. The story of Yeşiltepe shows the opposite. When the money ran out, the first things to be given up were the facilities; what kept neighbourliness alive was something written into no budget line: the few square metres in front of the door of the flat.
In the other housing buildings of the series the shared space always appeared as a promise: the roof pool of Cinnah 19, the club of the Hayat Apartment Block, the roof terrace of the 96’lar block. Yeşiltepe made the same promise at the largest scale and kept the least of it. Even so, among the cooperative estates that remain in Ankara from that period, it is one of the few where residents still go on producing shared space. The contradiction between the two is the subject of this article.
02The 1950s: a ten-storey cooperative at the edge of the city
In the Ankara of the 1950s most housing was produced by cooperatives; according to one study about 60 per cent of the housing built between 1948 and 1962 was the work of cooperatives. The state provided land and easier credit, and civil servants and professional groups came together and had their own homes built. Most of these cooperatives set up neighbourhoods of two- or three-storey houses with gardens; nearby Bahçelievler is the best-known example.
Yeşiltepe used the same instrument for a different form. Among its founders were members of parliament, ministers and senior civil servants; a resident who has lived on the estate for more than forty years says that the blocks were built mainly for members of parliament and that ten to fifteen American families lived in each block. The plot was at the edge of the city of that day, opposite today’s intercity bus terminal; a square of about 200 m × 200 m, that is, about 40,000 m².
The chain of cause and effect runs as follows: when an influential cooperative, a large plot and bank credit came together, the high block could be chosen instead of the house with a garden. According to the same resident, a loan of 11–12 million lira was taken from Emlak Kredi Bankası, and 18 artesian wells were drilled for water. Raising eight ten-storey blocks in a place the city’s water and roads had not yet reached could only be risked with such strength.
03Who drew it?
The project is by Rahmi Bediz and Demirtaş Kamçıl. Both studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul, kept up a partnership of more than forty years and drew many arcades and office buildings in Ankara. The preliminary and construction drawings of Yeşiltepe are dated 1955 and were prepared for the Yeşiltepe Building Cooperative. Kamçıl had also drawn the 1952 plans of the neighbouring Emek cooperative; that is, he knew the district.
In their own publication the architects describe their blocks as a “triple star” and give the reason in two words: openness and privacy. The arms stand at 120° to one another; no window of any flat looks at the window of another.
04The site: four pairs at four corners
The eight blocks are set symmetrically in pairs at the four corners of the plot; the middle is left empty. On three sides the façades are set back about 20 m from the road. This arrangement gathers the density at the corners and leaves a large garden in the middle: a park for 464 flats.
What was to be placed in the garden had also been drawn: a club, a club-restaurant, a swimming pool, sports grounds. Playrooms for children were intended for the roof floors. What the sources say is plain: the cooperative’s money was not enough. The playrooms on the roof are today storerooms that are rented out. As one resident recalls, when the blocks were finished there was not a single tree on the plot; today’s green was planted later.
1967: a quarter of the plot. While construction was going on the cooperative ran into financial difficulty, and in 1967 it sold about a quarter of the plot, together with the two blocks on it whose structural shell was complete, to another cooperative, Yıldıztepe. With the money that came in, the last two blocks were completed. This is why the estate has two names today: six blocks are Yeşiltepe, two are Yıldıztepe. This division, as will be seen below, created an experiment of its own accord: the same plan, two separate managements.
05The floor plan: a hexagonal void at its centre
Each block has ten floors above ground and six flats on each floor: two in each arm of the star. There are 58 typical flats per block; 464 in the eight blocks. Below ground level there are smaller flats and plant rooms. The structure is a reinforced concrete frame with brick infill; the building has central heating and double glazing.
The real invention of the plan is in the middle. Where the three arms meet, instead of closing the stairs and the lift into a box, the architects left a hexagonal void and wound a gallery around it. This ring, with a perimeter of about 44 m, is where the doors of six flats open. The void is continuous through ten floors: it brings daylight down and draws warm air up, that is, it works like a shaft for light and ventilation.
More importantly, a person standing in the gallery does not see only their own floor. They see the door on the opposite side of the void, the balustrades of the floors above and below, the neighbour coming down the stairs. The author of the thesis measured this: each door has a peephole, each with a field of view of about 120°, and the six together leave no blind spot in the gallery. On the one hand this is a feeling of safety; one of the residents interviewed says that the most important thing is security. On the other hand it is an arrangement in which everyone sees everyone, and not everyone likes this.
In some apartment blocks the neighbours know one another, in others they take the same lift for years without greeting; why? What decides it is often not the people but what the door opens onto. If the door opens onto a narrow, dark corridor, that is only a place to pass through. If it opens onto a place that receives light, where the opposite side can be seen and that is wide enough for a chair, that place becomes an extension of the home. The gallery of Yeşiltepe is the second: the doorstep of the street carried into a ten-storey building.
06The flat: a T-shaped living room
All the flats are of one type: two bedrooms, a bathroom, a separate toilet, a kitchen and a large T-shaped living room. The gross area is about 175 m² and the area inside the flat about 133 m²; the ceiling height is 2.70 m. The main balcony runs along the façade, and beside the kitchen there is also a service balcony.
The T shape is not an accident. According to the analysis in the thesis the living room can be divided into four zones: sitting, dining, working and, when needed, a third bedroom. In Yeşiltepe the residents divided one arm of the T with removable dividers such as bookcases. In addition, a second route was set up through the kitchen and the small room next to it: the bedrooms can be reached without passing through the living room. For the home life of the 1950s this detail says a great deal: while the guest is in the living room, the household goes round by the back.
The floor finishes show the rank of the room: timber in the living room, the vinyl tile of the period in the bedrooms and halls, terrazzo in the wet rooms. Part of the finishes was imported ceramic; the rest was bought from local producers. These are also what changed most in half a century: the double timber windows became single-frame plastic windows, the vinyl tiles became carpet, laminate and ceramic, the baths became showers.
07The same plan, two managements: an experiment of its own accord
The sale of 1967 left researchers a rarely found comparison. The two blocks that passed to Yıldıztepe came from the same project but were completed and lived in under a different management.
| Subject | Yeşiltepe | Yıldıztepe |
|---|---|---|
| One arm of the T-shaped living room | The resident divides it with a removable divider if they wish | The management divided it with a permanent brick wall; the flats were handed over with three bedrooms |
| Entrance hall | Patterned terrazzo floor | An ornamental pool in the middle |
| The original details of the shared areas | Changed more | Kept with more care |
The first row of the table carries a small lesson. The architect had drawn a flexible room; one management left that flexibility to the resident, the other decided in the resident’s place. Both have the same square metres, but one is a home that can be changed and the other a finished home.
08The numbers: what stands in front of the door?
On 26 April 2008 the author of the thesis walked through all the floors of two adjacent blocks, blocks 5 and 6, and counted what stood in front of the doors one by one. Each block has sixty doors; both are blocks that passed to Yıldıztepe in 1967, that is, they are under the same management.
In one block a place to sit had been set up in front of one door in every four; flowers had been placed in front of one door in every two. In the other block there is almost no seating, while plant pots are again common. The same plan, the same gallery, the same management, two buildings side by side; the difference comes only from the people inside. Architecture makes something possible; it does not make people do it.
This finding does not stand alone. Another study, which compares ten cooperative estates built in Ankara between 1950 and 1980, finds that in eight of them the use of shared space has remained limited, and that in only two do residents go on producing shared space; one of these is Yeşiltepe, and the shared space produced is again in the same place: the wide, bright floor landings inside the block, directly in front of the doors of the flats.
09Timeline
The flat ownership law was passed in 1965 and came into force in 1966; in Yeşiltepe the first transfers of flat ownership were made in the same year. This is the moment when cooperative membership turned into an individual title deed, and it also decides the fate of the shared facilities: once everyone is the owner of their own flat, collecting money for a shared pool is much harder.
In 1974 the blocks entered the cinema: in the film “Köyden İndim Şehire” a Yeşiltepe flat was used as the home of a rich jeweller. This is a good measure for understanding the place of a building in the eyes of its period: even twenty years later it was the place that came to mind when one said “a rich home”.
10Decision by decision: well judged, or too much?
| Decision | Relation to the life of the period | What happened? |
|---|---|---|
| A ten-storey block instead of a house with a garden | A large plot at the edge of the city; the cooperative had credit and influence | A large garden was gained in the middle, and it is still there today |
| The star plan with three arms | Privacy: the windows do not look at one another | It worked; each flat receives sun for part of the day |
| The hexagonal void and the gallery | The counterpart of the doorstep in the street | It became the longest-lived shared space of the building |
| The divisible T-shaped living room | A large family that receives guests | One management left it flexible, the other fixed it with a wall |
| Club, club-restaurant, pool, sports grounds | The way of life of a narrow circle | None was built |
| Playrooms on the roof | A shared space for families with children | They became rented storerooms |
| Refuse chute | The modern comfort of the period | Not used for more than ten years, for reasons of hygiene |
11Was it too much for society?
As a programme, yes. The club, the club-restaurant and the pool were a life known to a very narrow circle in the Ankara of the 1950s, and even that circle could not find the money for them. In this respect Yeşiltepe is on the same line as the other examples in the series: the promised shared luxury either never arrives or lives for a few years.
As a plan, no; in fact the plan knew society better than its architects did. In this country neighbourliness is not made in the club, it is made in front of the door: the chair put out in the street, the plant pot placed on the threshold, the plate passed through the half-open door. The gallery made room in a high building for this habit, which was expected to disappear with the move to the apartment block. It is not possible to tell from the sources how knowingly the architects did this; they describe the void in terms of light and air. The result is there all the same.
One conclusion of the thesis should also be noted: this bond is strong in the first and second generations and weakens in the later ones. The fact that the founding residents came from a similar circle had made neighbourliness easier; as the residents changed, the same gallery became for some only a place to pass through.
Because the place that works best in this building appears as a “space” in no schedule of areas: it is the circulation. In housing design the corridor and the landing are usually counted as a loss to be reduced. Yeşiltepe shows the opposite: one metre more of width, a window and a void through which the other side can be seen turn a passage into a place where people sit. To know where a person stops and where they hurry is to know which square metre will really be used.
12What did it bring, what did it take away?
Let us return to the claim at the beginning. The pool was not built, and today there are trees in the garden; the gallery was built, and today there are tables in it. When a budget is set aside for shared life in the next collective housing project, these two sentences should be read side by side: the most expensive shared space is the one most easily given up, and the cheapest is a doorstep drawn wide enough.