Learning From the Tuberculosis Crisis in Turkey: Spatiality and Modern Interiors in Yaşamak Yolu Journal (1929–1950)

Abstract

Yaamak Yolu [A Way of Living], the journal of the Istanbul Tuberculosis Association, played a pedagogical and propagandistic role in building a healthy nation after the establishment of the Turkish state. The journal is a valuable archive incorporating the spaces of tuberculosis combat during the 20th century, encompassing social, cultural, and political information. It reveals how tuberculosis was a crisis that influenced Turkey’s Modern Movement in architecture and modern interiors. The discourse on the contagious nature of tuberculosis and the healthy way of living in Yaşamak Yolu impacted ideas about modern interior design in different building typologies. After scanning the 1929-1972 Yaşamak Yolu issues from the Izmir National Library’s archives, this study categorized, analyzed, and evaluated the data at the intersection of tuberculosis and modern interiors, focusing on national and international sanatoria, housing, alternative interiors, and everyday items. Despite the journal’s broad coverage of architectural typologies, this study, among others, focused on the 20th-century Turkish sanatoria as conventional interiors. The notion that the sanatorium movement shaped the Modern Movement in architecture served as the foundation for this study. To reveal the journal’s vast breadth from urban to industrial scale, portable structures, everyday objects, and/or tuberculosis paraphernalia covered in the journal were evaluated as alternate treatment interiors, furniture, and objects. The extensive content and contextual information, along with the publication’s span from 1929 to 1972, made the analysis challenging. Therefore, and to overcome the constraints in selecting specific built environment typologies, this study set the framework to include the timeframe from the journal’s inaugural issue to the point at which the journal’s published doctors/ authors recognized the effectiveness of Streptomycin. This marked a turning point in the spatiality of tuberculosis and thus limited the scope of this study to the years 1929-1950. Due to its focus on the interiors of tuberculosis combat facilities, this study revealed that the journal proved to be a significant archive for the field of architectural historiography and design. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.