Homemaker or professional? Girls' schools designed by Ernst Egli and Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in Ankara, 1930-1938

Abstract

During the early years of the Turkish Republic, modern architecture became an active tool in the representation of the bourgeois ideal of domesticity. The most significant component of the new Turkish family was the image of the "republican woman" as a nationally-constructed icon. By comparatively examining Ernst Egli's Ismet Paşa Girls' Institute (1930) and Ankara Girls' High School (1936) with Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's unbuilt annex project for the latter (1938) this paper argues that girls' technical schools and girls' high schools contributed to the making of this much idealized image in considerably different ways. Such diversity enabled the governing elite in Turkey to make a class-based and spatially constructed categorization of women as economic actors: enlightened housewives specialized in one of the so-called "female arts" and upper-class professional women who would participate in public life. It is further argued that this categorization allowed Schütte-Lihotzky, in her design for the unbuilt high school annex in Ankara, to rework the broader "redomestication" issue which marked her earlier career in Weimar Germany.