“Think of the Ottoman Empire, which developed its peculiar modernity without experiencing the Tanzimat and its aftermath; this is the type of architect Turgut Cansever is,” said Beşir Ayvazoğlu, a well-known Turkish literature and biographical writer, in his short commentary on Turgut Cansever (1921-2009). Having passed away nine years ago on Feb. 22, 2009, Cansever was a well-known Turkish architect and a prominent figure in reinterpreting and refashioning the centuries old architectural heritage of Turkey by inventing a novel approach that combines traditional architectural principles pertaining to a set of moral values and beliefs with a modern perspective. Commentators rarely miss the chance to mention that Cansever is the only architect in the world who received Aga Khan Awards for architecture three times.

Architect’s responsibility

Cansever believed that constructing an architectural work should come along with a sense of responsibility. Unlike reading a novel or listening to music, which can be interrupted privately, people have to live with architectural works for decades or perhaps for generations to come, once the construction is finished. Thus, architects must design buildings respectful to society and social values with a concern for the future. The feeling of responsibility is what turns human creatures into human beings. It is the realization of being the pearl of creation that lays the burden of thoughtfulness on various strata of existence and of the duty of beautifying the world. The higher the level of consciousness, the greater the realization of responsibility. Without such principles, Cansever warns, architects would surrender either to market conditions or to individualistic architectural fantasies.

There is an inextricable relationship between what we believe in and what we produce. Human beings are rational actors who make conscious choices, and everything they construct reflects their beliefs and convictions. Thus, ethics and ethical concerns should be closely related with architectural practice too. What kind of a relationship between architecture and ethics should be established is a vital question that needs to be answered to understand Cansever. He believed that architectural choices could easily turn into fetishs if they reflected personal pride or merely aimed for self-satisfaction. Such an egocentric attitude also increases complexity in architecture. Cansever reacts to the self-ordained deconstructivist and post-modern attitudes that came to dominate the field with ever-growing influence. Instead, moral values, such as modesty and solemnity, should lead the processes of design, material selection and construction.

Cansever had real difficulties with the creator-artist type of architect. This attitude was combined with the market realities of attracting customers, bypassing legal requirements to increase profit and personal pretentiousness that resulted in cultural pollution and spatial detachments and incoherence. A building, Cansever argues, cannot go beyond mere technological success if it does not take material, technological and biosocial levels of existence into consideration simultaneously. Cansever also criticized approaching the land and city from the perspective of bureaucrats or technocrats, or paying too much attention to bureaucratic procedures, but instead offered viewing the land and city as manifestations of divine perfection, and consequently showing due respect to it. True architectural behavior would lead to listening to the voice of nature and to understand the order of a God-created environment, as it requires encompassing all aspects of existence.

Architecture as an Islamic art form

Cansever offered a universal conception of Islamic art, which also applies to architecture, and defined it as “obeying the truth with no ifs and buts; staying away from wrongdoing; submission, modesty and conforming to the structure of existence; seeming as you are; contenting oneself with less; being conscientious toward God, all that means to build things not to impress others.” Cansever described Islamic architecture on another occasion as a “movement in calmness, having the clarity of finitude, modesty and naturalness in expression. Rather than being dramatic or compelling, it is for beauty and ornamentation.” It is also a sort of colorful and exuberant picture, full of optimism, confidence and cheerfulness.

However, his conception of Islamic architecture is not an essentialist one. According to this concept, he means architecture carries certain virtues and values. Thus, a German, Russian or Japanese city can be more Islamic than a Turkish, Iranian or Egyptian one. For example, Cansever deemed Frankfurt an Islamic city, with its population of over 20 million and whose upkeep costs are lower than Istanbul due to its city planning. Likewise, Cansever found Russian-made Istanbul-like houses as Islamic as the basalt houses of Anatolia since both take the relationship between human and nature into consideration.

Architecture, localism and locals

Cansever expected architects to have certain qualities, such as paying attention to climate, ecology, the topography of construction, the consent of people who live in and around the place of construction, controlling climate conditions by passive methods and characterizing relations and tensions between different construction materials when used together.

Submission to the local condition of geography and using locally sourced materials were important assets for Cansever who taught that architectural work should give the impression that it is a natural part of the locality that has been built as if it has always been there. Finding locally produced architectural solutions to material problems that appear on a biosocial level of existence also means, to him, being in rapport with divine will. For instance, Cansever finds it very unreasonable and unIslamic to construct glass-covered buildings in Erzurum, an eastern city in Turkey, famous for snowy, cold winters. This means to challenge nature and challenge the given order of things, ending up polluting the world. Cansever believed that things natural and spontaneous are beautiful and closer to human nature. The most serious problem of 20th century architecture, according to Cansever, was to favor vanity and turn people into passive creatures. In contrast, he always favored local solutions to local problems with the participation of locals. He communicated with people and paid attention to their views and opinions about the work. Sometimes, criticism from non-architects could even lead him to change the facade or the public side of the design.

Cansever’s concepts

Cansever loved to use single-word concepts as illustrative tools to depict certain ethical qualities that a proper architectural work should supposedly contain, such as quietness (asudelik), objectivity (bîtaraflık), timidity (çekingenlik), piety (dindarlık), inert expression (durağan ifade), reverence (huşu), honesty (dürüstlük), simplicity (sadelik), optimism (umut), elegance (zarafet), submission (tevekkül), mellowness (yumuşaklık), respectfulness (saygı), dignity (vakar) and enjoyment (zevk). One example of how he used these concepts can be seen in his comparison between the Nuru Osmaniye and Selimiye mosques. Although some argue that Ottoman architecture was able to produce its own baroque in the 19th century, like the Nuru Osmaniye mosque, Cansever did not hold the same opinion. When comparing Nuru Osmaniye and Selimiye, he argued that the former was designed to demonstrate the grandeur of load-bearing architectural elements, while the latter is the embodiment of quietness, calmness, elegance and inert expression.

Turgut Cansever’s primary concern was to combine architecture with ethics that entailed a quintessential overlap of religion, tradition, architecture and cultural identity on a sociopolitical axis in contemporary Turkey. Those who read his books or those who had the chance to meet him in person know well the endless optimism he had for the future. Thanks to his strong belief in ideas that have precedence over actions and the idea that what changes the world is the power of ideas, Cansever strived to find “true” ideas in architecture and disseminating them. His architectural practice and intellectual legacy have a huge impact on the new generations of educated middle-class conservatives of Turkey and will probably influence the next generation of architects in decades to come.

This article has first appeared in Daily Sabah on February 24, 2018.

Turkey has been witnessing proliferation of the traditional architectural forms as the country reconciles with its Ottoman past. The early republican regime took radical steps during the 1930s and 1940s to systematically downgrade and erase the cultural memory inherited from a more cosmopolitan and sophisticated Ottoman heritage. This caused a deep controversy and made a traumatic impact on the Turkish society. The persistent war on culture and the discursive hegemony of the republican elite produced lots of tragedies with which the people of Turkey still have to face. In fact, rediscovery of the Muslim heritage was a general phenomenon all over the Muslim world from East Asia to North Africa since the 1980s. However, this development halted in Turkey in the 1990s due to the secular establishment’s suspicion of conservative masses and their traditional values. Heavy hegemony of the secularist elite over “culture” only recently tended to be lifted and the past has been relatively emancipated from monolithic readings of history, a great opportunity for enhancing democracy and cultural diversity in Turkey.

Reflections of the current process of reconciliation with history can be seen in different spheres of life from the shop names to architectural forms of public and private buildings, ever growing interest in the television series based on historical figures or periods in addition to the TV shows hosting popular historians and discussing popular historical subjects. Even the daily language, which is slowly being occupied with Ottoman-Turkish words, rediscovered and occasionally reinvented with a sense of amazement as well as amusement. No doubt, this is not a refined or a painless process which creates its own set of problems like the production of kitsch or generating not always accurate reflections of identity based on the revisionist readings of the past. However, conservative religious circles have lately begun to question their perception of history, which is overall torn between exalting and disparaging. A popular Ottoman historian has baldly claimed “history is poisoning us” in a monthly journal called Lacivert referring to the current problematic interpretations of the past. Another author in the same journal complained the superficial appropriations and understandings of the past that are both likely to waste a lucrative opportunity and thus preclude proper contemporary reconfigurations addressing the present needs and expectations. The tension and competition between and within secularist and conservative “quarters” over culture and history will apparently continue in the following decades to define the public space in Turkey and the architectural forms and preferences will constitute one of the most visible and hot topics of this debate.

In this broad socio-political framework, one should analyze the architectural choice of the Diyanet Center of America in Maryland which is being inaugurated this weekend by the participation of the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The center is built on 60,000 square meters, half of which is covering the constructional area. The huge project consists of a conference hall, library, cultural center, a mosque with a capacity for 1,500 people (3,000 including the courtyard, being the largest mosque in the U.S.), a fellowship hall including a restaurant, cafe and shops, a double Turkish bath with its pool and indoor sports hall, a guesthouse, a state-of-the-art Museum of Islamic Civilizations, a neighborhood consisting of Turkish houses, a Turkish-Islamic garden, open sport areas, picnic areas, fountains and parking area for 400 vehicles.

The architect of this huge complex is Muharrem Hilmi Şenalp who is known with his great amount of knowledge and expertise on as well as his firm commitment to the classical Ottoman architecture. His office, Hassa Architecture, was named after the Mimaran-ı Hassa Ocağı (State Architecture Corps) which was an official organization founded by the Ottoman Empire and that the corps was responsible for the architectural design along with undertaking the construction projects. Şenalp’s symbolic reference is not designated for a synthetic namesake but undoubtedly has some essential characteristics. His devotional determination in reproducing classical Ottoman architectural forms while designing today in the twenty-first century is due to a deliberate identity quest which was not in the slightest imposed or supported by the construction material, concrete and steel. The Hassa Architecture manifests its objective in their website, epitomizing the project as “an opportunity to represent our deep-rooted millenary civilization by handling it as a whole with its overall course and originality.” Therefore, this experiment actually stands out as a bald manifestation and perhaps a radical response to the contemporary post-modern and deconstructivist architectural currents which one may fairly criticize for their decontextualizing effects through disregarding the existing architectural landscapes and suggesting a definite rupture from the past.

The architectural designs of various constructions in the Diyanet Centers of America can be traced back in the earlier works of Şenalp. For example, the mosque in the Center resembles very much to Ankara Subayevleri (1996), Tokyo (1993-2000) and Berlin Sehitlik (2004) mosques from an external glance. Likewise, the Turkish houses and other buildings with similar functions bear a clear resemblance to the Küçük Çamlıca Kiosks (1998) and to certain buildings in the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives Complex (2009), both in Istanbul. The architectural ancestry of this choice recalls a more substantial question that is to what degree such designs can be regarded as up-to-date examples of historicism or anachronism. A great number of pictures generously shared by the Hassa Architecture in their website recalls the Ottoman pavilions in the sumptuous World Fairs of the late nineteenth century, a time period in which eclecticism and, from a critical perspective, historicism was predominant all over Europe. One may also feel uneasy about the relationship between these architectural forms and the place where they were built.

However, from one perspective, Şenalp’s approach can be regarded one of the several legitimate architectural choices and innovative at least as much as the postmodern and deconstructivist architectural experimentations. Şenalp’s architecture follows the principle of renewal from within the tradition, which means that the design, freed from virtuosic concerns, communicates with the forms of the past and associates them through new configurations with due respect to their proportions. It uses the old technics and craftsmanship but also benefitting from new materials and expertise. Although having clear predecessors, inlaid doors, for example, are not direct replications of any existing historical doors. Instead they are original designs fashioned by the living craftsmen adding their own minimal stylistic contributions and even more vaguely addressing the “modern” taste as well. Şenalp’s recently inaugurated Marmara University Theology Faculty Mosque in Altunizade Istanbul demonstrates his openness and perspective regarding the new forms of architectural designs. The mosque looks entirely “contemporary” but at the same time full of references to the past. In fact, the dome of the mosque, being the most impressive part of the building, is inspired by an existing traditional form, called kırlangıç kubbe which can be seen in some public and civil architectural examples in Erzurum.

Beyond doubt, the architectural designs of Şenalp, whether traditional or contemporary, is a deliberate manifestation of a quest for identity of its architect and of its sponsors. This approach reinterprets the traditional forms in such a way that it is related to the past, history and memory. This is one architectural quest for identity, along with various other approaches, and a response to the globalizing world in which values are being homogenized and social memory is altered through a structural imposition of decontextualized spaces. A visitor of the Diyanet Center in Maryland notes that the mosque is already filled with Muslims from various backgrounds, all gathering every week for Friday sermons and excited by the scene that makes them feel “at home”. With respect to the contemporary discussions in Turkey, it seems that the public space, though still on its long way, is becoming more pluralistic in terms of the cultural manifestations of Turkey’s past in present.