ABSTRACT
The “Turkish House” was invented as a nationalist category at the turn of the twentieth century. It was a cultural manifestation of Turkish nationalism within the political turmoil that would eventually lead to the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Later, it would be crystallized as an architectural formula in an attempt to nationalize the modern architecture of the 1930s, utilizing the formal qualities of vernacular houses. This formal typology, resting on key elements such as cantilever projections and hipped roofs with overhanging eaves was later used as a reference for (nationalist) monumental architecture in the 1940s. This nationalist idiom has recently been appropriated by the Islamist Justice and Development Party that has been ruling Turkey since 2002. This time, the vernacular reference is used not only formally but also as a discursive referent in buildings built abroad to represent the Turkish government. This chapter will discuss two such buildings: the Diwan Hall of the Diyanet Center of America in Maryland, and the Consulate General and the Permanent Mission to the UN in New York, which is officially labeled “Turkish House.” The former building is part of a mosque complex (külliye) designed by a Turkish architect famous for his neo-Ottoman mosques commissioned by the Turkish government, while the latter, which is under construction at the time of writing, is designed by the international architecture firm Perkins Eastman. Through a comparative analysis of the two buildings and their design processes, this chapter discusses the transnational negotiations in the making of a globally recognized national image referring to Islam.
