ABSTRACT
During the mid-20th century, Istanbul’s Florya coastline simultaneously accommodated new seaside practices, cultivated the formation of a beach culture, and signified modernity and secularization. Its development, particularly the vision of the coastline for both tourism and enduring leisure practices, reveals the entanglement of leisure architectures with the politics of modernization. It also demonstrates influential transnational flows within postwar geopolitics as well as local architects’ interest in internationalization and modern architecture. By examining archival material and deciphering the architectural drawings of the Florya scheme, this chapter unpacks the ubiquitous ideals of progress and the images appropriated for these ideals with a stance that architectures of tourism contributed to advancing a notion of modernity while constructing an ideology of exclusion.
