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Contemporary architectural discourse mostly assumes an unmediated link between architecture and culture. This is a historical assumption, however, rooted in colonial encounters when the notion of cultural difference first entered the architectural scene. In the first part of my article, I focus on a statement by Vitruvius that provides ways of thinking about architecture outside cultural identity categories. In the second part, I analyze two nineteenth‐century texts to show both the cultural inscriptions of architectural discourse and their breaking points. Finally, I argue that recognizing the historicity of the relationship between architecture and culture involves problematizing architecture as an identity category as much as questioning culture as an architectural category.

The 1930s marked the most intensive period of modernisation in Turkey. The newly established Kemalist programme was determined to bring the young Republic into the European economic, cultural, and political milieu as an equal partner and advocated nationalistic idealism and progress through modernisation. 2 Such reforms as changing the alphabet from Arabic script to Latin, adopting the Swiss Civil Code, and replacing the Ottoman fez with the European-style brimmed cap, signi ed important steps towards this goal. In the founding years of the Republic, visible symbols of modernity were actively deployed to publicise the image of the new nation state as a radical break from its Islamic Ottoman past. Within this context, both 'modern architecture' and 'the modern Turkish woman' constituted important components of the image repertoire of modern Turkey.

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