“Space is no scientific object removed from ideology or politics. It has always been political and strategic,” the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre asserted. Nowhere does this seem to reverberate more today than in Ankara, Turkey’s often forgotten and somber capital.

Once a remote backwater in the Anatolian heartland, Ankara became the showcase of the newly forged Turkish Republic established in 1923. Modern Turkey's founder, Kemal Ataturk, envisioned the capital of the new nation-state as the antithesis of the grandiloquent Istanbul, and it certainly doesn't compete for pomp with its bigger sister.

During the interwar years, republican elites commissioned German, Swiss and Austrian architects and urban planners to erect a new city that would embody the Kemalist project. Instead of awing with the resplendent mosques and splashy palaces favored by the Ottomans in Istanbul, Ankara would be designed along the rationalist and functionalist lines of European modernist architecture. 

To this day, Bosphorus-enthralled sightseers continue to be struck by Ankara’s austere and minimalist flavor. Among its drab architectural landmarks are the national parliament, the railway station and several administrative buildings. To Ankara denizens, however, these buildings are far more than a few slabs of unadorned gray stone. They are the icons of an era, cherished and disdained.