Gürol Öngören, P: Engendering Space For Education in Turkey

In the 1920s and 1930s modernization was the state ideology in Turkey, which affected all social systems, including education and architecture. This ideological program of the new nation-state gave special attention to women and their education. In this context, the Girls‘ Institutes were significant for representing modernization, with reference to the formation of the ‘new woman‘, in both the new system of education and also via the buildings that were ed for such education. This study examines the Ismet Pasa Girls‘ Institute in Ankara -the first of those institutions- as examplary of contemporary educational institutions as well as of contemporary architecture in Turkey. The aim is to discuss the modernizing attempts of the new nation-state, as well as the ambiguities it incorporated and the changing attitudes it presented towards tradition. The modernization agenda of the state and traditional values resisting to it constituted the dilemma and the ambivalence of the Kemalist perspective during the early Republican period, creating a problem of identity in all attempts of modernization that will form the basis of the spatial analysis in this study.