From the back cover of the book:

“Turgut Cansever was one of the most original and dissenting voices of Republican-era Türkiye. From the 1940s onwards, he not only pursued an active career in architecture but also developed ideas on the shaping of the physical environment; most importantly, he built a career in cultural criticism centred on architecture. He sought to interpret the built environment—spanning from the urban scale down to the individual building—within the context of Türkiye’s realities of cultural change. There is scarcely a topic of debate—from the country’s processes of modernisation and urbanisation to Westernisation, mass housing needs and technology—that he did not address. His attempt to reconceptualise transformation and architecture through the Islamic beliefs and intellectual sources that form the cultural building blocks of Turkish society is of vital importance. His approach suggests that contemporary Türkiye should begin to reflect on architecture and, more broadly, all cultural creation not through a radical and traumatic ‘forgetting’, but through a calm, serene and dispassionate ‘remembrance’.”