Modernization and the role of foreign experts: W. M. Dudok’s projects for Izmir, Turkey

Abstract

Modernization and the Role of Foreign Experts: W. M. Dudok's Projects for Izmir, Turkey, focuses on Dudok's unrealized mid-twentieth-century projects for Izmir, viewing them within the context of foreign architects’ and planning experts’ entanglements in Turkish modernization. Using recently uncovered materials (scaled drawings, sketches, photographs, notes, maps, and letters) from the Dudok archives at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam, and Ahmet Piriştina City Archive and Museum, Izmir, Meltem Ö. Gürel opens a window into the postwar era's complex landscape of intersecting local and global architectural cultures. Analysis of these documents sheds light on modernization's ubiquitous impact on architecture and urbanism, and exposes the changing roles of international (i.e., European and American) experts operating in Turkey before and after World War II.