In footsteps of Turgut Cansever: Constructing an architectural style

Turgut Cansever was one of the rare architects in Türkiye who internalized the Muslim conception of existence and was able to reflect it in a natural flow within his architectural works. Through both his writings and the debates around his works, he succeeded in building a significant body of thought and accumulation on this reflection. In fact, the label “architect” falls short when describing Cansever. He was an intellectual and a philosopher. Turkish intellectual Akif Emre, when speaking of legendary Bosnian leader Aliya Izetbegovic, emphasized his identity as a man of thought before that of a statesman, and pointed out that even if Izetbegovic had never appeared on the stage of history as a statesman, he would still have secured a place in history through his intellectual contributions. The same is true for Cansever. Even if his architectural treatises did not exist, his Muslim sensibility, expressed in interviews, writings, and conversations – his profound perspective on the city, humanity, and built forms, and his ability to interpret this perspective as encompassing all of life – would still have brought him forward in Türkiye’s intellectual history and secured him a significant place.

What makes Cansever’s individual achievements even more valuable is that the seeds he sowed have sprouted, found resonance, and continued along their path in such a way as to create an ecosystem – generating a flow regardless of scale. Mi’mar Architecture Office stands today as the most significant representative of this tradition, inheriting that legacy and carrying forward the same sensitivity to the reflection of the conception of existence in architecture. The book “The Construction of an Architectural Office,” which encompasses the office’s 20-year journey of building, has been published by Klasik Publishing.

The book opens with Yusuf Civelek’s comprehensive essay titled “Mi’mari Exists Within Architecture: The Meaning of Having a ‘Style.’” In this essay, Cansever’s ideas and the works of the Mi’mar Architecture Office are examined in detail within this framework. The essay becomes more comprehensible after reading the long interview with Ahmet Yılmaz and Ibrahim Hakkı Yiğit at the end of the book. For instance, their connection to Cansever was initially through his writings and works. Yiğit, while studying medicine, decided to abandon his medical education and begin architectural studies after reading an interview with Cansever in the Dergah magazine. Later, his path crossed with Yılmaz in the same department, leading them to continue their journey of reading and producing together along these lines. Therefore, as Yılmaz notes, there was no apprenticeship to Cansever, nor direct witnessing of his design and construction process: “In the end, until we established the office, we were reading and discussing Mr. Turgut in joint reading and discussion platforms; we felt close to him. After all, he spoke of Islam, of the Islamic city, and of “Tawhid”; in other words, he established a connection with our faith. In reality, we did not possess the depth to directly grasp the relationship between his ideas and his works, nor did we have the chance to witness their practical execution. So, we never had the opportunity to see how his ideas were reflected in design. He simply felt close to us, we had intuitions belonging to a source of inspiration, but we could not establish a direct relationship.”

In fact, when the essays and works in the book are examined, it becomes clear that this situation also turns into an advantage. While Cansever, through his writings and works, offered guidance on the plane of the relationship between the conception of existence and architecture, it fell to Yılmaz and Yiğit to relate this conception to new compositions and to further develop it. These long-term efforts and sensitivities ultimately led to the shaping of a style. Indeed, the connection between Cansever and the office was established precisely through this style. This indirect bond is also emphasized at the beginning of Civelek’s introductory essay: “Yet what is interesting is that Ibrahim Hakkı Yiğit and Ahmet Yılmaz have indirectly embraced the spatial and formal formulations distilled from the ideas that Cansever, over the years – like Fuzuli’s expression “piercing a pearl with the diamond of poetry” – had painstakingly grounded through great effort.”

Civelek highlights two important features in university campuses, which also hold a central place in the office’s own works: courtyards and the way buildings are positioned in relation to one another. While courtyards – so prominent in Ottoman public architecture – are revived in the office’s university campus designs, the individuality of each building is preserved within the larger whole: “In other words, Cansever’s act of associating the self-generated irregularity of the neighborhood (mahalle) with a consciously designed dispersal (külliye) by the hand of the architect, and theorizing this as a philosophy of existence unique to civilization, is at stake here. It is clear that Mi’mar Architecture has embraced this conceptualization. The deliberate complexity created by school buildings, student centers, assembly halls, libraries and dormitories – replacing the old madrassas, caravanserais, soup kitchens and houses – derives its meaning from this approach. In these new kinds of külliyes, space flows by constantly shifting direction between walls that alternately approach and recede, while the prevailing ‘disorder’ finds its counterpoint in the courtyards nested within otherwise highly orderly masses. This can be interpreted as the metaphorical reflection into space of a metaphysics that emphasizes everything’s existence through its opposite.”

It is well known that, for a long period in Türkiye, cultural forms were produced according to the conception of existence of Western civilization. In response to this challenge, Turkish people have no choice but to dare to construct a new language that encompasses all areas of life by producing content in every field according to their own conception of existence, and to remain on this path with such an intention. Cansever, much like what writer Kemal Tahir sought to achieve through his novels, was always on the road in search of this new style in the field of architecture. Yılmaz, emphasizing the contradiction between their formal education and this pursuit, highlights that their architectural experience was shaped through engagements with sources outside of formal training: “When we realized that the world of forms shaped by the social and cultural accumulations of our geography did not align with the theory and practice of the modern education we had received, we began to question: Who are we? Mi’mar Architecture is the story of this quest. By questioning our architectural practice shaped by modern architectural education, we wished to look to our own cultural world and past experiences in order to design works belonging to our own value universe. For the world of thought that constitutes the human being shapes what they create and do. In this regard, we chose the method of looking back to prior experiences and learning through practice (meşk). These past experiences taught us that a human-centered spatial construct is only possible by preserving the unique existence of the human being – endowed with infinite diversity beyond scale – and that such a construct is also only possible through an environment that avoids monotony and one-time pleasures, instead enabling the human being, as a conscious and active existence, to engage in continuous discovery.”

We also see a similar pursuit in Yiğit: “As Mi’mar Architecture, we wished to create designs that value past experience while carrying it into the future with the knowledge and technology that build the present. While transforming the cultural accumulation that constitutes our being into form, we aimed to engage with form at every scale and to take part in – or even dissolve within – the world of forms. We wanted to present a world of forms that seeks our essential identity, reminding contemporary society – equipped with every kind of power – of the value of the human dimension. Moreover, we sought to practice architecture with an awareness that in today’s global world, where environments are shaped not by the differences of societies but by their sameness for the sake of creating markets, human beings are rendered insensitive toward themselves, other people, living beings and nature. Since the human being is a thinking, exalted existence (ashraf al-makhluqat), we regarded as our essential task the creation of living spaces in which planning directs them from passivity toward activity – thus enabling them, while living in the city, to recognize and discover it, and to participate. As Mi’mar Architecture, we have held the conviction that in our urban planning, the sense of the human scale across all layers of the city is only possible by approaching the horizontal and vertical dimensions (planning and mass formation) as a whole. We believe that when human beings inhabit the physical environment at these scales, it allows them to use it, to contribute to it, to intervene in it, and to put forward ideas. All these possibilities, by strengthening the capacity to act, can open the door to the emergence of healthy individuals and societies that are conscious of their own existence.”

Within this pursuit, we witness that those who are on the road engage in efforts across three domains. The first is the understanding of the conception of existence; the second is the detailed examination of historical experience as a practical field in light of this conception and the grasp of its characteristics with sufficient clarity to enable new productions; and finally, the third is the creation of new forms that, in arriving at the present, will find resonance within the flow of life. For this reason, Halil Ibrahim Düzenli points to these three pursuits in Cansever: “Cansever’s world of thought, or conceptual framework, begins with inquiry into the realm of existence, continues with the understanding of historical experience, and is rendered contemporary through the search for solutions specific to geography.”

What makes the Mi’mar Architecture Office valuable is that they are the laborers of our collective quest in the field of architecture as a nation. The works they have produced over their 20-year journey – presented in detail in the book – bear witness to this labor. Another significant quality that makes the office valuable is that, in this search for a style, it has become a school. Hundreds of young architects who have passed through the office at various times continue to work as representatives of this pursuit wherever they go. In this context, while the founders of the office, without ever having been Cansever’s apprentices, have shown patience in the hardships of construction – often through trial and error – to shape this style, the young architects trained in this office have themselves become directly involved in this stylistic pursuit. Indeed, as Civelek acknowledges at the end of his introductory essay, he pays tribute to this labor while also emphasizing these young architects as a source of hope: “If we place Sedad Hakkı Eldem at the beginning, and at the end the young architects trained at Mi’mar Architecture who have begun to fly with their own wings, what we see is a stylistic pursuit that now spans nearly five generations, continuing its path with a discourse that, especially since Cansever, has established relations capable of embodying meanings spread across various layers of existence.”