How to Establish a Capital City.

When it was declared the capital in 1923, Ankara was a town of thirty thousand at the foot of a citadel. Within fifteen years boulevards, ministries, a railway station, an opera house, a university and embassies were built; the city became the architectural programme of a state. Today, walking from Ulus to Kızılay, you can read the two languages of that programme side by side; you only need to know where to look.

The first language is the First National Architecture. Born in the last Ottoman years and carried to Ankara in the Republic's first decade, it dresses modern public buildings in Seljuk and Ottoman motifs (pointed arches, tiles, wide eaves, domes). In Ulus, Vedat Tek's second parliament (1924) and Ankara Palas completed by Kemaleddin (1927), Arif Hikmet Koyunoğlu's Ethnography Museum (1928) and Turkish Hearths building (now the Painting and Sculpture Museum, 1930), and the Italian Giulio Mongeri's Ziraat Bank (1929) and İş Bank buildings are its densest examples. All lie within walking distance of each other and you can enter all of them today as museums or public buildings.

The second language is the modernism of the 1930s. The young Republic turned its architecture, like its face, towards Europe. German and Austrian architects (Clemens Holzmeister, Ernst Egli, Bruno Taut, Paul Bonatz) established a plain, functional and monumental idiom in ministries, schools and public buildings. Taut's Faculty of Languages, History and Geography in Sıhhiye (1937), Holzmeister's ministry blocks and the new parliament (begun 1938) in the Bakanlıklar district, Şevki Balmumcu's Exhibition Hall in Ulus (1933) converted into the opera by Bonatz (1948) and Şekip Akalın's Ankara station (1937) represent the period. Unornamented facades, long horizontal lines and stone cladding; once you notice them you will see them everywhere.

To read both together, just walk the length of Atatürk Boulevard; it runs from Ulus to Çankaya and the city advanced along it from north to south over time. Domes and tiles in Ulus, stone modernism in Sıhhiye, 1950s apartment blocks in Kızılay, embassies in Kavaklıdere, the presidential mansion in Çankaya. The city itself is a chronological exhibition.

If you ask what was lost; the early republican fabric changed heavily after the 1960s with dense apartment building, and the first apartment houses of Kızılay and the garden houses of Yenişehir have almost disappeared. Some Holzmeister buildings in the ministry district are still in use but cannot be entered. You can read traces of Hermann Jansen's 1932 city plan in the street layout of Bahçelievler and Kavaklıdere.

Practically speaking; the architecture route is a six-kilometre walk starting at the station in the morning and ending in Ulus, so choose a weekday for the station museum and the Ziraat Bank Museum to be open. For photographs, morning light hits the east-facing facades of the boulevard and afternoon light the west-facing ones. The terrace in front of the Ethnography Museum overlooks all of Ulus; it is the best place to understand how the two styles spread across the city.

Ankara's architecture matters not because it is beautiful but because it shows how a state wanted to build itself. Pay attention to the language of the buildings and you will see on the street the history you read in the museums.