Photos

Seyfi Arkan built a bridge between modern and local architecture in Türkiye and very little information can be found about him. Even though he is referred to as the "state architect" or "Ataturk's architect" in our architectural history, Arkan had a much deeper impact with the buildings and architectural style he left behind. For this reason, we find it important to offer a glimpse into his life and works as we share our photo collection of Seyfi Arkan, who also designed the "second turbine" structure (additional power plant building) at Silahtarağa Power Plant between 1943 and 1944, as well as various transformer structures within the factory site.

Arkan was born in 1904 in the Üsküdar district of Istanbul, into a family belonging to Ottoman military and scholarly classes. He started his primary education at the French School in Kadıköy, then completed his secondary education at Galatasaray High School, and started his architectural education at the School of Fine Arts (Sanâyi-i Nefîse Mektebi) in 1924. Arkan started working at the İdare-i Fenniye when he was still a student and graduated in 1928. Later, he went to Germany with a state scholarship granted to him as a result of a competition he won in 1929. Arkan strengthened his practical experience by spending 3 years in the workshop of Hans Poelzig, one of the important names of modern architecture, who would later have a great influence on his architectural style and buildings. Upon his return to the country in 1934, he made a swift start to his career and was first appointed to the Ministry of Culture, and then in 1935 he began to offer "urban planning courses" as the assistant of Ernst Egli at the Academy of Fine Arts (currently Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University).

The early Republican administration wanted modern architecture to be the dominant building style and for this reason prioritized the service of Turkish architects. Seyfi Arkan won one architectural competition after another in these years and undertook important state building projects in his early 30s. On this occasion, he established a close relationship with Atatürk and designed the Makbule Atadan Mansion in 1935, the Florya Mansion and other buildings of the complex in 1936 and the Turkish Embassy in Tehran in 1938, all as a result of competitions he won. Unfortunately, very few of these buildings of the late1930s have survived to the present day, most of which were built after special requests from high-ranking bureaucrats of that period. His high-profile works and popularity in this period earned him the title of "pioneer of modernism". Arkan later founded an architectural office called Türk Himark Plan and Yapı Müessesi and continued to offer urban planning courses at the Academy of Fine Arts and took a break from his public projects in the 1940s due to the economic downturn of the Second World War and with the death of Atatürk, and concentrated more on urban planning and development plans.

Arkan's "multidimensional professional production", whose undeniable contributions to the field of urbanism as well as architecture can be seen in the urbanism reports he wrote between 1938 and 1956, manifested itself in public buildings and housing projects in the modern style in the 1930s, industrial buildings embodied in the Silahtarağa Power Plant in the 1940s, zoning plans, and then rapid urbanization reports and "cheap housing projects" in the 1950s.