İdeolojik bir strateji olarak yıkım: Ankara örneği (1994-2023)

In architectural practice, demolition is a physical intervention aimed at reconfiguring the urban fabric and spatial narratives. Often carried out within the frameworks of capital driven transformations, demolition acts do not simply eliminate the material existence of a building; they also serve as a prerequisite for transforming the entire set of values produced through and related to a building. In this context, demolition functions as both a terminating and constitutive act, facilitating the transformation of existing narratives and the construction of new ones. This dual role means that demolition embodies a productive ambiguity rather than a fixed meaning, simultaneously representing notions of ending and beginning, cancellation and establishment. As such, demolition is not solely a practice of destruction but as a threshold for ideological reconfiguration. Moreover, it can manifest indirectly through the severance of a building's historical, cultural, and symbolic contexts, the transformation of its meaning, or its erasure. Within this framework, demolition emerges as a multilayered practice exhibiting typological diversity, rather than merely being an annihilation tool. Ankara stands out as a prominent example where typological diversity in demolition practices is employed and manifested through various forms. Since 1994, under the governance of neoliberal-Islamist municipality, demolition interventions have largely targeted public buildings that represented the narratives and values of the Republican era. This process has included the complete annihilation, the suppression of narratives through renovation and reprogramming practices, and the construction of new public buildings by synthesizing Ottoman and Seljuk styles, to create counter narratives to republican modernization. In this way, demolition has been transformed into an ideological strategy instrumentalized to reshape the narratives associated with the Republic and modernism in Ankara. In this context, this study aims to conceptualize acts of demolition as an ideological interpretative tool and to develop a typological catalogue of these acts through selected case studies. It further investigates how demolition serves as a strategy through which power asserts and consolidates its hegemony by reshaping the public architecture.