The Exhibition rests on new, visual and textual information unearthed and brought together with already materialized historic information. The archival work rests on 17-year research, which has been used in re-modelling the Ankara of 1933, on its 10th anniversary of being proclaimed the Capital of the new Turkish Republic. The old town was of 30,000 population during the War of Independence; however, it lived influx of populations all over Anatolia as well as from İstanbul after the war. The Administration and the Municipality were forced to commission new expansion plans for the growing city, the first of which already got obsolete in 1924 (Loercher), the second was used in 1925 (Loercher), and yet a new plan was ordered through an competition in 1927 (Jansen).
The Exhibition narrates the Ankara of 1933, with its residents, with newly emerging urban life and unique examples of memorabilia, using archival material with rare postcards and new photo-albums. It further focuses on the New Neighbourhood “Yenişehir”, an output of the 1925 Plan, with its ‘new’ and ‘early modern’ housing, as well as the new ministry buildings for the new capital city. This urban expansion barely represented a local but modern taste, with intellectual, technologic and financial restrictions, but still comparable with the new global counterparts. The decade was rather erased by scholarly studies, parallel to the vis-à-vis destruction it experienced, as the early original buildings were replaced by new ones with larger sq.m. in the event of a growing city centre.
