Urbanism

Le Corbusier's work titled Urbanisme, dated 1925, which holds an important place in his urban vision and can be described as the manifesto of the modernist city, has been published by Arketon Yayınları with Pelin Kotas's translation. Şehircilik (Urbanism) is the second Le Corbusier book from Arketon Yayınları, established to publish architecture and urban books under the general editorship of Aykut Köksal. Like the first book, Modulor, Şehircilik has been printed with its original format and typography, carefully preserving its iconic value.

In his preface to the book, Aykut Köksal states: "Le Corbusier's Şehircilik is the first comprehensive work that played a decisive role in the 20th-century urban vision. Şehircilik is the right source to see how the famous architect read the industrial city and what paradigm this reading legitimized. However, the meaning of the text is not limited to this; it has another dimension that will particularly interest today's reader: Şehircilik is also one of the important texts in the history of 'utopia' and stands at the meeting point of two types of utopia: 'literary utopias' and 'architectural utopias'. Literary utopias place the spatial model proposal at the forefront of their texts, while architectural utopias, with an inevitable necessity, integrate their designs with a social model proposal. Le Corbusier's text exists precisely in this common area, sometimes even approaching literary utopias more closely.

One of the points that will attract the attention of Turkish readers of Şehircilik will be the numerous references to Istanbul. Just as all utopian writers find their own models in distant and mysterious geographies, Le Corbusier also wants to find many features of the city he is looking for in Istanbul, which was the farthest place he had visited until the date he wrote Şehircilik, and which had not yet lost its mystery at the beginning of the 20th century.

Le Corbusier's Şehircilik is a text open to different interpretations. The publication of this text, whose meaning is not limited to the architectural context, in Turkish will enable new readings to emerge, carried by a new language."