After the proclamation of the Republic, Turkey and the world entered a period of radical changes. One of the main issues that the cadres who founded the Republic emphasized was the design and realization of modern educational and production structures that would raise modern individuals committed to the revolutions. Architecture was seen not only as an aesthetic field but also as a means of building a new society.
When Prof. Dr. Ernst Egli, who made a great contribution to the institutionalization of modern architecture in Turkey, came to Istanbul in 1927, he was welcomed by Architect Kemaleddin Bey at Sirkeci Station. He then traveled to Ankara and met with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Atatürk showed the plans of the Teachers' School that was under construction and asked the following question:
“Mr. Professor, did what you saw give you the impression of a modern school?”
After a brief pause, Egli tried to give a diplomatic answer:
“Your Excellency, if we work together with Mr. Kemaleddin, we can of course turn the construction into a modern school.”
Ataturk responded in a clear way:
“I didn't ask you that, I just asked you if what you saw gave you the impression of a modern school.”
Egli writes in his memoirs that after this question he was forced to speak his true thoughts and clearly stated that the existing plans did not reflect a modern school. Atatürk turned to the Minister of Education and demanded that the old plans be shelved and the school be redesigned by Egli. Thus, with the republic, the foundations of national modern architecture were laid more consciously and decisively.
In line with this understanding, factories and educational institutions sprang up in many Anatolian cities. Along with the Sümerbank Cloth Factories, Tekel Tobacco Factories and Sugar Factories established in Anatolia, Akçadağ Village Institute (Malatya), Arifiye Village Institute (Adapazarı), Kızılçullu Village Institute (İzmir), Gölköy Village Institute (Kastamonu), Kepirtepe Village Institute (Kırklareli), Pulur Village Institute (Erzurum), Hasanoğlan Village Institute (Ankara) and Pamukpınar Village Institute became symbols of this modernization move. The factory chimneys and village institutes rising in Anatolia represented both the modern face of the republic and the material basis for the reconstruction of a nation.
At the Akçadağ Village Institute, the foundations of which were laid in 1940, students lived in tents; while receiving education, they were also constructing the school's buildings. Classrooms, dormitories, a library, a movie theater, an infirmary, workshops and lodgings were built by hand. The campus was not surrounded by walls, and the main road ran through the institute, aiming for direct contact with the villagers. A campus surrounded by apricot orchards, a life in the middle of the steppe, a new world was being built.
The “Road of Love” paved with colored stones brought by students from Kayseri, the red bricks with students' signatures on them produced in brick quarries, the water brought from Sultansuyu and the electricity generated from the small hydroelectric power plant were all concrete indicators of collective labor.
The Village Institutes were not just institutions that taught reading and writing. It was a revolutionary education model based on critical thinking, production and being a free individual.
However, they could not last long due to the counter-work of anti-people mentalities; they were closed down before reaching the targeted level and number of teachers.
After 1980, the liquidation of the symbolic public spaces of the republic accelerated. With privatizations, the industrial memory of the republic disintegrated. Sümerbanks, Mensucat cloth factories and sugar factories were privatized. This plunder of change opened deep wounds in the social fabric of cities. Factories that once provided employment for thousands of workers were taken out of production in a short period of time, the machinery was dismantled, the lands were opened for rent projects; residences, shopping malls and hotels were built in their place.
Thus, the people of Anatolia lost both their jobs and their public spaces. Spaces of production turned into spaces of consumption.
Village Institutes and factories were part of the social, cultural and spatial memory of the Republic of Turkey. They were not just concrete buildings; they were the embodiment of an era's ideal of egalitarian development.
The schools and factories that had been established to educate the children of the people and enable them to participate in production were later rendered dysfunctional and handed over to the rent-seeking sphere of capital.
This will to modernize, established a hundred years ago, still makes us ask the question today:
Is the future of a country built by production and education or by shopping malls?