This is the first article in the series Finding Aids, an editorial collaboration between Salt Research and KoozArch that develops critical and accessible routes into the Architecture and Design Archive.

Federica Zambeletti / KOOZ An archive does not simply preserve architectural history; it participates in constructing it. How has Salt’s Architecture and Design Archive expanded an understanding of spatial practice? We’re particularly interested in ephemeral materials: the correspondence, petitions, contracts and receipts that reveal the often-overlooked forms of labour behind architecture?

Salt Research While architectural archives have historically prioritised formal project drawings and blueprints, we can say that Salt has gradually broadened the scope through our acquisition practices. As is often seen when evaluating prominent collections, not all archives are built with the same approach; while some are acquired with a strict focus on the architectural projects and drawings itself, the intentional inclusion of supplementary materials such as personal letters, photographs, slides, and administrative correspondence, significantly expands the narrative. By cataloguing these everyday documents alongside drawings, the focus naturally shifts from the finished building as an isolated achievement to a more comprehensive view of the collaborative processes behind its making.

Through this wider lens, materials like receipts, contracts, photographs, correspondence offer a more grounded perspective on spatial practice. They help to illuminate the everyday negotiations, economic constraints, and forms of unseen labor that ultimately shape the built environment. Rather than presenting architecture purely as the translation of a designer's vision, these records suggest that spatial production is heavily mediated by material supply chains, bureaucratic friction, and sometimes the practical realities of the construction site. Consequently, through many inspections of our researchers and users from all around the world, our understanding of architectural history becomes less about prominent forms and more reflective of the complex, ongoing human and logistical efforts that sustain it.

KOOZ Architectural archives and histories are often organised around recognised authors and completed buildings. How does the archive allow us to encounter architecture more broadly, as a spatial practice shaped by research, teaching, renovation, adaptation and other forms of collective work?

Salt Research We hope that our Architecture and Design Archive allows visitors to encounter architecture as a practice carried out across many settings, not only as a sequence of authored, completed buildings. Because the collections are the personal and professional papers of practitioners, they often record work that never reached construction, especially competitions. Erdoğan Elmas, whose career runs from the 1960s to the 2000s, took part in many architectural competitions, including those carried out with Zafer Gülçur and Ertur Yener. His archive therefore documents research, speculative design, collaboration and the repeated testing of ideas, none of which a list of built works can show. The archives also record teaching and education as architectural labour. Nezih Eldem, Muhlis Türkmen, Ali Mukbil Gökdoğan and Erkal Güngören worked at many schools, including Istanbul Technical University and the State Academy of Fine Arts. Their lectures, student projects, correspondence and drawings inside their archives show how knowledge was produced and passed throughout the years. Design decisions in practice often followed from what was taught and tested in the studio. Also, archival materials relate to the process, not only to the finished product. Many documents enlighten the importance of the many processes’ background thus we can inspect more about the unknown figures and possibilities.

This is why the institutions people worked with, the people they worked alongside, and the schools where they taught and studied matter. Each archive becomes a node in a network: a competition team, a faculty, a professional association or an office shared across decades. Reading the collections together lets the researchers trace how pedagogy, partnerships and institutional affiliations moved ideas through a discipline and how a practitioner’s education shaped the practice that followed. Correspondence, contracts, reports, photographs, travel records and later renovation files also bring in the long afterlife of buildings, including maintenance, adaptation and alteration by users. They show that architecture does not end at completion. Thus, the archive shifts attention from the single author to a field of collective work, in which research, teaching, travel, upkeep and negotiation are part of what architecture is.

KOOZ Many of the collections trace exchanges between Türkiye, the Eastern Mediterranean and territories further afield. How do travel, education, migration and international collaboration emerge through the archive, and how might they complicate the idea of an independent national architectural history?

Salt Research Many archival materials show that architecture in Türkiye was made through constant movement across borders. The photographs of the architect Kemaleddin Bey include documents on his restoration work in Jerusalem and at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which places an architect of the late Ottoman and early Republican period inside a wider Eastern Mediterranean field of practice. Ali Saim Ülgen’s travels from the 1930s documented Anatolia and the Ottoman heritage across the whole territory, and his surveys reveal a practice of research and recording that shaped how the architectural past was understood and later protected. Travel here is a method of knowledge production as well as a journey, we can say. Sedad Hakkı Eldem and Nezih Eldem both carried out work abroad, and Nezih Eldem’s archive preserves material from his trip to Italy in the 1950s, when he worked with Gio Ponti. These records can express how ideas, techniques and professional relationships moved between Istanbul and European centres of design.

Actually, these exchanges complicate the idea of an independent national architectural history. Because the archive keeps showing a field that was connected to others at every stage; while education and migration run in both directions. The close relationship between Paul Bonatz and the Söylemezoğlu family, and between Clemens Holzmeister and the Çinici family, left a large body of shared correspondence, drawings and other material in the archive. Foreign architects who worked and taught in Türkiye formed lasting personal and professional bonds with local families and practices, and their legacy is held within archives. This can be read as a kind of reverse migration, in which the traces of European careers settle in Türkiye and become part of its architectural record. Read together, these collections point to a history made through teaching, friendship, patronage, collaboration and shared work, with the national frame as one among several.

KOOZ Every archive is shaped as much by its absences as by its holdings. Which spatial practices, communities or forms of knowledge remain difficult to trace within the collection, and how can these gaps be made legible without claiming to fill them?

Salt Research Every archive is shaped by its absences.For instance, although Cengiz Bektaş carried out many projects focused on Anatolia and preserved the materials documenting them between the 1960s and 1990s, architects working mainly in Anatolia remain under-represented so the collection leans toward big-city practices. Women architects of the 20th century are another gap, since their papers were less often kept, donated or recognised as archives. Architectural models are also unevenly documented: Şevki Pekin cared about archiving his work before his death, so his collection includes model photographs, as do those of Fazıl Saffet Aysu, Doğan Tekeli and Cengiz Bektaş. Yusuf Z. Ergüleç was a model maker, thus his archive holds many architectural models. But the archives keep photographs of models rather than the models themselves, because their volume makes space a handicap for every archival institution.

These gaps can be made legible without claiming to fill them by naming them openly. Stating which regions, communities and kinds of work are thinly represented can be read for traces of missing nuances. The gaps can also be treated as invitations for further acquisition, oral history and research in other repositories. The archive can then be read as a partial, constructed record, with the shape of what is missing as visible as what is present. Besides these handicaps and gaps, the ability and opportunity to cross-read any topic between different archival collections lets researchers fill some of the gaps in context of any research.

KOOZ The next instalment of Finding Aids turns to Ayla Karacabey’s travel photographs and postcards and photographs of the Architecture Archive. What can these images of correspondence reveal about the formation of an architectural gaze, and about relationships between land, memory, distance and displacement that may be less visible in conventional project archives?

Salt Research Ayla Karacabey’s photographs show an architectural gaze formed through movement. Karacabey (1935-2012) studied at the Istanbul American College for Girls, Vassar, Harvard (1960) and Columbia (1973), worked with architects such as Marcel Breuer and Edward L. Barnes, and later helped found the architecture faculty at Yeditepe University in the 2000s. Her photographs from the US years record what she chose to look at. They include Park Avenue’s glass-and-steel towers, with Lever House and the Seagram Building, in the same building where she later set up her own office in 1976. They also include Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and works by Paul Rudolph and Eero Saarinen at Yale and Wellesley, so they show how a student and young professional absorbed postwar modernism, new materials and the first stirrings of context-driven, local approaches to design. Her travel photographs, from South America to Asia, extend the same attention to space, built environment and cultural setting across a much wider geography. She also photographed contemporary projects of Ankara.

The way the collection survives also tells a story about memory and displacement. Because Karacabey trained and worked mostly in the US, most of her archive is not inside Turkish institutions. About 1,500 of her photographs reached researchers through second-hand markets before being donated to Salt, so the archive is a scattered remainder of a multilayered career. If one would check the photograph and postcard collections inside other archives such as Cengiz Bektaş, Nezih Eldem, Harika-Kemali Söylemezoğlu and Ali Saim Ülgen, the materials are versions of a wider habit in which architects learned by travelling and looking, and the photographs record what they chose to study or inspect. At the same time, the contemplating materials express the influence and embodiment processes of the designs made by architects and designers with numerous hints regarding the backgrounds and feasibility of those projects.

Featured image: Restoration of the inscription on the tomb of Vezir Mehmet Pertev Pasha. Salt Research, Ali Saim Ülgen Archive

BIOS

Salt Research Architecture and Design Archive is an archival collection encompassing professional and personal documents of architects and designers active in 20th century Turkey. It includes a variety of materials, ranging from sketches, drawings, correspondence, contracts, maps, and photographs to audio recordings and videos. Accompanying these extensive sources is a selection of architectural photographs by Gültekin Çizgen and Kayıhan Türköz, taken in various cities in Turkey between the 1960s and 2000s.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. Trained as an architect, she works as a researcher and storyteller, with interests rooted at the intersection of art, architecture, critical theory, and regenerative practices. Prior to dedicating her full attention to KoozArch, Federica collaborated with the architecture studio and non-profit agency for change UNA/UNLESS, contributing to a range of cultural projects.