Step 01 | The Ideological Backstage
We start our journey focusing on the "backstage"—the political, financial, and social forces that allowed Ataköy to move from a blueprint to a reality.
Pillar I: Politics, Capital, and the Architecture of Modernization
The birth of Ataköy in 1955 was a calculated move by the Democrat Party (DP) government, led by Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. This era marked a radical departure from Turkey’s early Republican isolationism, pivoting toward a liberal-democratic, pro-Western identity fueled by NATO membership and the Marshall Plan. In this context, architecture became a tool of soft power. The government invited the renowned Italian urbanist Luigi Piccinato to act as a consultant, alongside chief architect Ertuğrul Menteşe, to design a neighbourhood that would look and feel like a modern European "Satellite City." The goal was "social engineering": to create a domestic environment that signalled Turkey’s arrival into the Western postwar culture. The design, characterized by open plans and vast public parks, was intended to produce a new kind of "modern citizen"—one who lived in the grid but looked toward the horizon.
Pillar II: Financial Engineering & The Paradox of Mass Luxury
While the state-owned Emlak Kredi Bank funded the project under the guise of "mass housing" for civil servants, the economic reality quickly shifted toward the elite. The high cost of importing premium construction materials and the sheer scale of the green infrastructure meant that the "Satellite City" became a haven for the burgeoning middle and upper-middle class. This created a fascinating architectural paradox: the unadorned, socialist-leaning aesthetics of European mass housing were sold as a "holiday village" lifestyle in Istanbul. This class hierarchy was physically built into the DNA of the buildings through the inclusion of "maid’s rooms" and separate service entrances. These features represented a collision of worlds—a modern, modernist interior that still maintained the traditional socio-economic divides of the late Ottoman era. Ataköy was not just a housing project; it was a financial and social experiment that used the grid to normalize a new, Westernized status symbol.