The Ankara of Holzmeister, Egli, Taut and Jansen

Enter the campus at its western end on Turgut Baştuğ Street; as the Goethe-Institut describes it, the whole layout sits on a pedestrian axis that begins here. The axis climbs a monumental stair, passes through the opening left in the lower floor of the old Rectorate and opens onto a pedestrian zone lined symmetrically by four three-storey buildings. The first campus plan and a few of the buildings were by a German architect named Baurat Naht; when Naht went home over a pay dispute, design and construction passed entirely to Egli and the work was finished in 1933. The institution was founded the same year: the Ankara Higher School of Agriculture, opened in 1930, became the Higher Institute of Agriculture on 30 October 1933, modelled on German agricultural faculties, and started with five faculties, agriculture, forestry, veterinary science, natural sciences and agricultural arts. In 1948 the agriculture and veterinary faculties joined Ankara University; until 1955 this was the country's only faculty of agriculture.

You see Egli's hand best in the old Rectorate: two storeys over a half basement, a rectangular mass, no ornament at all. A two-storey portico with deep eaves covers the west facade, and symmetrical stairs on either side take you up to the raised ground floor. The facade is finished in the rough render called edelputz; inside there is wooden parquet, wood panelling and a three-flight timber stair. The conference hall in the northern part of the ground floor tells you how seriously a higher-education institution was taken in those years. This is an open university site; Kültür Envanteri records it as accessible, but follow the gatekeeper's directions and walk quietly during class hours.

Source: Goethe-Institut; Ankara Üniversitesi Ziraat Fakültesi; Kültür Envanteri.

From Ulus Square head south to the top of Atatürk Boulevard where it drops towards the Opera. The five-storey stone building at number thirteen is the one Holzmeister designed for the Emlak ve Eytam Bank; sources put the design in 1933-34 and completion in 1934-35. On the facade you see a neoclassical order, marble cladding and cut Ankara stone at the entrance. Long left empty, the building was restored by the post office and opened as the Stamp Museum in October 2013; Ottoman and Republican stamps, thematic series, postcards and objects from the history of communications are on show, and Wikipedia counts 4,404 Turkish and 1,500 foreign stamps. Check current opening days and admission on the PTT museum page. This is the only building where you can see a Holzmeister interior, stair and floor heights, so remember to look up from the stamps.

Leave the museum and walk to İstiklal Street; number ten, the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, is also Holzmeister's, built in 1931-33. The bank was founded by a law of 1930, began operating on 3 October 1931 and still has its head office here; there is no way in, you look from outside. Read it with Kültür Envanteri's description: symmetrical order, a recessed three-bay entrance under a broad canopy, stone-clad surfaces, even rows of windows, a hidden roof ending in a thin cornice. On your way back to the square look at the Sümerbank building opposite; it is often credited to Holzmeister, but the German architect Martin Elsaesser drew it in 1937-38, it opened on 29 October 1938, and Ankara Social Sciences University uses it today.

Source: PTT; Arkiv; Kültür Envanteri; TCMB tarihçe; Wikipedia.

From the Stamp Museum walk south along Atatürk Boulevard. Past the Opera, on the boulevard, the long flat-roofed building now working as the Zübeyde Hanım Vocational High School is Egli's İsmet Paşa Girls' Institute of 1930-34: a four-storey central block ruled by horizontal lines, vertical stair blocks on either side, corner masses with halls added in 1934, and rounded corners on the balconies that recall Mendelsohn. The Goethe-Institut counts it among the earliest and most consistent uses of international forms in Ankara; as a school it is seen from outside. From here turn into Sezenler Street and reach Taut's high school.

Ankara Atatürk High School was founded as a secondary school in 1886 and took its present name in 1938; it moved on 10 October 1940 into this building, drawn in 1937 by Bruno Taut with Franz Hillinger. Taut had come to Turkey in 1936 to head the Ministry of Education's architecture department; he died in Istanbul in December 1938, shortly after designing Atatürk's catafalque. The east facade reads easily from Sezenler Street: at the block A entrance two rows of columns carry a broad canopy over a raised plinth clad in Ankara stone, at the southern end a ten-column canopy covers the block C entrance, and lower arcades run between them. Taut avoided symmetry; he put classrooms in the long east-west wings and the conference hall, dining hall and gymnasium in the short wings. Rusticated ashlar runs to the plinth line, rough render above, tiled roofs. The former headmaster's lodge at the south-west corner is now the school museum. This is a working high school; stay out of the grounds and watch the facade from the pavement.

Source: Goethe-Institut; Leyla Alpagut (DergiPark, Mimarlık 351); MEB; Wikipedia.

Come to Cebeci by Ankaray and walk ten minutes north from Dikimevi to the Mamak Cultural Centre. This building is one of Egli's first jobs in Ankara: the Music Teachers' School. The school was founded on 1 September 1924 to train music teachers for secondary schools and started in mud-brick houses in Cebeci; Egli's new building of 1927-29 gave the country's first music school a permanent home. Seen from above the plan resembles an upturned piano; classrooms, a hall, a dining room, dormitories and practice rooms were gathered in one building. In the mid 1930s the school became an academy and then the Ankara State Conservatory, and in 1938 it was enlarged with new rooms. When the conservatory moved to its new building in 1985 the structure became Mamak municipal offices; after 2005 it was restored and turned into a cultural centre.

Today it holds theatre, exhibition and concert halls, a library, the municipal conservatory and courses, which makes it the one school building where you can wander Egli's corridors freely. Its plain mass and undecorated surfaces show Egli's early rationalism; drawing such a building in Ankara at the end of the 1920s was, as the Goethe-Institut explains, one of the first signs of the break with the domed and arched language of the First National Architecture. In Egli's Ankara list it appears as the State Conservatory, dated 1927-29. If there is a performance on, go into the hall too; check the programme on the municipality's site. If you come in daytime, listen for instruments in the corridors; the building still teaches music.

Source: Goethe-Institut; Mamak Belediyesi; Ekonomim; Wikipedia.

Return to Kızılay by Ankaray and walk south along Atatürk Boulevard to Bakanlıklar. The building stretching out behind a 248 metre front of beige travertine is Holzmeister's last and largest Ankara work. In 1937 the parliament opened an international competition for a new building; fourteen entries came in, and in the result announced on 28 January 1938 the first prize was shared between Holzmeister, the Frenchman Albert Laprade and the Hungarian Alois Mezara, with Holzmeister's scheme chosen for construction. The foundations were laid in autumn 1939, then the Second World War and lack of money stopped work for years; in 1957 the Baghdad Pact meeting was held in the half-finished building. After Holzmeister returned to Austria in 1948 his student and assistant Ziya Payzın ran the site. The building was finished in 1960 and opened on 6 January 1961; twenty-three years passed between competition and opening.

The five-storey concrete structure is travertine outside and thirty kinds of Turkish marble inside; the Entrance of Honour opens through five bronze doors into the Hall of Honour. The monumental language Holzmeister had spread through the government quarter since 1927, symmetry, stone cladding and a raised entrance, reaches its largest scale here. The building is viewed from outside; cross to the far pavement of Atatürk Boulevard to take in the whole front. If you want to see the interior, parliament holds an open day on the first Saturday of every month: no appointment is needed, you enter through the Dikmen Gate with valid identification and a visitor card; no guided visits are given while the General Assembly sits, during budget debates or on public holidays. Check times on the open-day page at tbmm.gov.tr.

Source: TBMM halk günü sayfası; SALT; Goethe-Institut; Wikipedia.

Take Ankaray from Kızılay and get off at Bahçelievler. When Jansen won the 1928 competition he was asked to plan Ankara for three hundred thousand people; he made Yenişehir the seat of the ministries, left the Citadel as a crown to be greened, drew Atatürk Boulevard as the main spine, and his plan was approved on 23 July 1932. Bahçelievler is that plan's most tangible housing experiment. The building cooperative founded by senior civil servants in 1934-35 was Turkey's first; on Jansen's advice it chose the Abdi Paşa Farm land west of the city, outside the plan boundary of the day. Jansen drew both the layout and the house types: about 350 one- and two-storey houses with front and back gardens, green belts lined with three rows of acacia, and a school, market, club and library in the middle. The first plan balanced single, semi-detached and terraced houses; the members wanted detached houses in gardens, and local architects adapted the plan accordingly.

Today 7th Street, Aşkabat Street, is the main street of that garden city. As the Goethe-Institut writes, the garden houses were gradually demolished and replaced by tall apartment blocks; only a few of Jansen's houses survive. As you walk, look at the width of the plots, the tree rows in the side streets and the garden walls left at corners; you can still read the plan in the street pattern. Jansen's principle as quoted by MİMDAP, "Ankara can never be an industrial city", makes sense here: the workers' quarter was planned separately and more simply, while the civil servants' quarter got its gardens. End the route here, on the pavement of a garden city.

Source: Goethe-Institut (Jansen, Bahçelievler, Site Planlaması); MİMDAP; Wikipedia (Jansen Planı).