u/PostColonialPlans

It was designed in the 1950s to house a mix of Londoners and bring life back to a bomb-flattened City. Today it’s a listed monument full of bankers and architects paying £1,500/sqft for the privilege of getting lost in concrete corridors.

There’s a cruel irony baked into architectural utopianism. The more thoughtfully a place is designed, the lakes, the arts centre, the elevated walkways, the sense of a world unto itself, the more attractive it becomes to exactly the class of people it wasn’t meant for. Capital doesn’t care about your social vision. It just prices it.

Leftebvre called it decades ago: the ‘right to the city’ gets hollowed out when urban space becomes a commodity. The Barbican is Exhibit A.
So what was the actual mistake? Was it the architecture? The lack of rent controls? The decision to list it, freezing it in amber for wealthy preservationists? Or is this just what happens when you build something genuinely great in one of the world’s most expensive cities with no policy teeth to protect it?

For me, Architecture cannot be equitable on its own. It never could.

Kyrenia is one of those places that’s been continuously inhabited since around the 10th century BC, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Venetians, Ottomans, then the British all left their mark. Most tourists go straight for the crusader castle on the harbor. Fair, it’s stunning. But there’s other stuff worth slowing down for.

When the British took Cyprus in 1878 they started building proper civic infrastructure across the island. The style was neo-classical: columned entrances, ornate cornices, local limestone, deep shaded verandas because Mediterranean sun is no joke. But here’s the fun part, because they hired local Cypriot builders, the colonial buildings ended up naturally absorbing traditional local design elements, creating this accidental hybrid that’s neither fully British nor traditionally Cypriot.

The district court in Kyrenia is a perfect example of that. And unlike most colonial-era buildings it’s not a museum or a hotel. It’s been doing the same job since the British Empire built it and somehow outlasted the empire itself.

What does the building recall for you?

Stowe House is fascinating because it’s basically a timeline of 18th-century British architecture in one building. Instead of being designed by one architect, it evolved over decades with contributions from Vanbrugh, William Kent, James Gibbs, and Robert Adam, so you can actually see changing architectural tastes layered into the house itself, from Baroque drama to Palladian and Neoclassical elegance.

Used to live in London and still think about this place constantly. Bolton House off Lime Street is one of those buildings that genuinely stops me in my tracks every time. A 1907 Art Nouveau facade in blue, white and green faience, with these beautifully proportioned arched windows, slim pilasters, and a foliage frieze running above the first floor that’s so crisp it looks like it was laid yesterday.

What gets me is the Moorish influence woven into the composition, the horseshoe arch detailing and the ceramic colour palette feel almost Andalusian, which makes absolutely no sense for the City of London, and yet it works. The way the tiling wraps the façade gives it this tactile quality that the glass and steel around it just can’t compete with.

The 1984 rooftop addition is the obvious elephant in the room, two plain storeys plopped on top with zero attempt to respond to the original language of the building. The proportions of the whole elevation take a hit. But the original five floors survive intact enough that you can still read Selby’s intent.

Does anyone actually know anything about A.I. Selby? The man designed something genuinely rare for Edwardian London and seems to have vanished from architectural history entirely.

While I was researching historic mansions in Istanbul, I came across Sabuncakis Köşkü, also known as the “Eye House” or Gözlü Ev, located right by the sea in Maden Mahallesi on Büyükada. The striking façade immediately caught my attention, particularly the large All-Seeing Eye prominently placed on the central pediment.

The mansion was built in 1904 during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. It was commissioned by Yorgi Sabuncakis, a wealthy Greek flower merchant originally from Aleppo. Greek architect Prof. Fotiadis designed it in a neoclassical style inspired by Greek temple architecture.

The property features several notable symbolic details including the prominent All-Seeing Eye, ten bee reliefs on the garden gate, acacia motifs, and classical columns. These elements make it one of the most distinctive late-Ottoman period residences on the Princes’ Islands. I’ve never seen the mansion myself, but the photos alone made me want to learn more about its history.

Narmanlı Han is a historic 19th-century building on İstiklal Avenue in Istanbul. It was once used as the Russian embassy and later became known as a place connected with artists, writers, and cultural life in Beyoğlu.

After its recent restoration, it reopened with shops, cafés, and restaurants. Some people see this as a successful preservation of a historic building, while others feel that the restoration made it too commercial and changed its original character.

What do you think about this kind of restoration?

One develops, over time, a certain impatience with the way Wright’s influence gets discussed. The usual story is imitation dressed up as homage. Horizontal brows bolted onto buildings that have no structural reason for them. Organic rhetoric applied to thoroughly inorganic thinking. Çiper is the exception that exposes how thin most of that tradition actually is.

The Yavuz Evi sits in Mersin, completed 1981, three storeys of reinforced concrete on a tight urban plot. The street facade gives almost nothing away. Blank, closed, almost severe. Most people glance at it and move on. That is precisely the wrong response.

Çiper was an ITU graduate who spent his career in genuine intellectual pursuit of what organic architecture actually demanded when transplanted into Turkish conditions. He was accepted to Taliesin and never made it. What he did instead was arguably more interesting: he worked out the principles from the inside, without the apprenticeship, and built a body of work that holds its logic under scrutiny in a way that borrowed Wrightian aesthetics almost never do.

The closed facade of the Yavuz Evi is not austerity for its own sake. Mersin is hot and humid and dense. That wall of concrete is doing serious thermal work. The light comes from above, from high clerestories, from sources you cannot see from the street. Step inside and the spatial order completely reverses itself. The compression at entry, the release into lit interior volume, the sense that the building has been turned deliberately inward to face itself rather than the city. That is the destruction of the box, properly understood, executed in a material culture that had no Prairie School tradition to lean on.

What I find quietly remarkable is how little documentation exists in English. DOCOMOMO Turkey presented on this building in 2011 and that is more or less where the trail goes cold for anyone not reading Turkish. Çiper’s entire output, one of the most disciplined and intellectually serious architectural practices of the late twentieth century in that part of the world, sits almost entirely outside the conversation this community tends to have.

If anyone has access to better archival drawings or photographs I would genuinely welcome them. The man deserves better than obscurity.

Completely new to this subject, but I read that practically all the leading figures of the Young Turk movement around 1908 were Masons. They were also the ones pushing to modernize Istanbul’s urban layout and public buildings. Did the lodge actually shape their political vision, or were they just using the network? How does Freemasonry relate to political reform historically?