Environmental challenges and developmental angst: Mimarlik and the early environmental discourse in Turkish architecture

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine and contextualise the emergence of environmental thought in Mimarlik a Turkish architecture magazine within the period starting with its inception in 1963 until the military coup in 1980. In Mimarlik this brief phase marks the introduction of the basic terms and concepts of environmental discourse. More interestingly though it demonstrates the influence of a developmental discourse on the uptake of environmentalism and environmental problems by Turkish writers. In line with the anti-imperialist tendencies of the Turkish left movement in the 1960s and 1970s environmentalism was dismissed mostly as a ‘Western’ construct or a tool of ‘imperial domination’. As a result the architectural discourse of the 1970s in Mimarlik paid relatively little attention to the political opportunities the environmental emphasis could bring or to the imagining of a radically different architecture. © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.