ARCHITECT KEMALEDDIN: A LIFE AT ONE OF HISTORY'S TURNING POINTS (1870-1927) |
Finishing
Regrettably Kemalettin Bey 's dazzling career crowned by his restoration of the Kubbet-us Sahra in Jerusalem and the RIBA award he won for it did not have a happy ending. The cool stance developing towards the end of the 1920s on the National Architecture comprising Ottoman forms he represented in Ankara, the city he went to on an official call and where he built important structures, led to his alienation and solitude.
However, at that time such alienation was nothing unique either to him or to Turkey. In the 1920s with the emergence of modern architecture that offered a whole new world of shapes countless architects of the generation of Kemaleddin Bey, who could not break free from the forms of old, shared the same fate around the same time almost all over the world.
He lived in a time segment that was as full of joy and ebullience as it was of traumatic disappointments. And his life ended in a hotel room in Ankara on 12th July 1927.