Dissertation Title:

German-Swiss-Austrian Influence on Modernist Heritage in Turkey and Adaptive Reuse as a Solution for Atatürk Forest Farm

Supervisor(s):

Prof. Anna Lundqvist
Dr. Christine Fuhrmann

Description:

This dissertation aims to examine the influences of architects and urban planners from German speaking countries on the city of Ankara, Turkey and it investigates Atatürk Forest Farm (Atatürk Orman Çiftliği), which was designed by Hermann Jansen and Ernst Egl, as a case study.

After Ankara became the Turkish republican capital, it also became a leading city for new, modern urban plannings among Turkish cities. During the modernization of Ankara and other Turkish cities, the architects and urban planners from German speaking countries who were invited to work in Turkey played a big part in this process. They designed and built many governmental and civilian buildings but unfortunately changing political situations in Turkey made the protection of these inherited buildings difficult. Atatürk Forest Farm (Atatürk Orman Çiftliği) is a modernist project that is under the threat of being ruined as well.

As Jansen and Egli planned the farm and its buildings as agricultural and socio-cultural part of Ankara, Atatürk Forest Farm must be specifically protected and adapted to the city with a new function by method of adaptive reuse. Therefore in this dissertation, the land and the buildings will be analyzed historically, technically and architecturally. According to this analysis, new functions will be recommended to the buildings.

Short Bio:

N. Rengin Sazak is a PhD candidate in Heritage Studies at Brandenburg University of Technology since summer semester 2019. She obtained her Bachelor degree in Interior Architecture and Environmental Design at Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey in 2012 and her Master degree in the same department in 2016. During her Master studies she won an Erasmus scholarship and studied in Architecture at Riga Technical University in 2013-2014. Within this period, she focused on Art Nouveau Heritage of capital city of Latvia, Riga. Her Master thesis is called “Analyzing the Contributions of Rehabilitated Buildings to Socio-cultural Sustainability by Examples from Turkey and Latvia”.

She attended workshops and symposiums related to interior architecture, architecture and Turkish-German relationships. She won the scholarship of Goethe Institut “Präsidentstipendium – Gestern und Heute” in 2016 and had a chance to observe the history, culture and architecture of Berlin for 10 days.

Her main research interests are modernist heritage, industrial heritage, adaptive reuse and rehabilitation of heritage buildings, conservation and rehabilitation principles for interiors, socio-cultural continuity and collective memory. Her main career goals are working for organizations such as UNESCO and Docomomo and involving the design process of adaptive reuse/rehabilitation projects for neglected modernist and industrial heritage.

sazaknil[at]b-tu.de