Hesitant Moderns

Işık University Publications' new book, "Hesitant Moderns: Schmitthenner / Pikionis / Fathy / Eldem / Correa. Architect Ideologues in the World and Turkey," written by Uğur Tanyeli and photographed by Cemal Emden, has been published.

The book examines "hesitant modernities," as Uğur Tanyeli calls them, one of the countless intellectual approaches that, while positioned within modernity, adopt a critical stance towards it, focusing on architecture. Throughout world history, only modernity produced a regime of thought that considered its opponents legitimate and normal. Hesitant moderns are a group of those opponents. Once it was realized that knowledge in the modern world was not fixed, nor did it define a singular truth, a critical front would emerge, formed by those who believed it used to be so but was lost. They longed for that old "reliable" and "solid" knowledge universe they believed was lost because they had hesitations about what modernity dispersed and pluralized. There are still those who express this hesitation, long for that old disciplined past, and think along such lines. They tried, and are trying, to revive that lost, but more hypothetical than real, architectural paradise.

The book "Hesitant Moderns" aims to explain how this front was established in architecture by discussing the constructive, design, and intellectual works of a group of important architects. The architects discussed were chosen from Germany (Schmitthenner), Greece (Pikionis), Egypt (Fathy), Turkey (Eldem), and India (Correa) to illustrate the global diversity of hesitant moderns. Aiming to discuss the broad front of hesitant moderns in vastly different social environments, the book examines architectural hesitations from the early 20th century to the present and questions what possibilities for contemporary hesitation exist.

All photographs in the book were specially taken by Cemal Emden across a geography stretching from India to Egypt and Germany. Thus, "Hesitant Moderns" attempts to bring theoretical and ideological discussions it focuses on to the agenda without pushing the design quality of those architectural products that declare hesitation into the background. This work, which aims to look at discussions that have taken place in the world and Turkey for over a century with fresh eyes, examines a global problem that concerns much more than just the group of architects it focuses on.