Villa Ögel: A Vanishing Example of Modern Heritage at Şaşkınbakkal

This study investigates Villa Ögel, a rare surviving example of Suadiye’s modernist garden-villa era (1940s–1950s), to illuminate its architectural, historical, and socio-cultural significance amid Istanbul’s rapid urban transformation. Suadiye is a coastal residential district on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, with Villa Ögel located in Şaşkınbakkal, a smaller micro-geographical area within the broader Suadiye neighborhood, representing a specific locality within its wider urban and historical context. As neoliberal policies and post-1999 earthquake “renewal” initiatives erased nearly all traces of Suadiye’s early Republican heritage, dating from 1923 to 1950—a formative period of the Republic of Türkiye marked by state-led modernization, changing social structures, and new approaches to domestic architecture and urban development—Villa Ögel’s precarious survival offers a lens through which to examine the tensions between modernist preservation and profit-driven urbanization. The research is contextualized within Suadiye’s evolution from a 19th-century summer resort to a densely urbanized neighborhood, marked by the replacement of garden villas with high-rises. Combining archival analysis, published sources, informal oral communication, and architectural surveys, the study reconstructs the villa’s history, design, and materiality. Key findings reveal its hybrid construction—featuring Tuzla’s “S&P Tousla” bricks and reinforced concrete—and its role as a socio-cultural artifact: designed by naval engineer Kazım Ögel, the villa hosted non-Muslim summer tenants and reflected gendered social norms, evidenced by the educational disparity between Kazım and his wife, Aliye Sakibe Hanım. The study concludes that Villa Ögel embodies a transitional architectural language, bridging Ottoman-era kiosks and modernist apartments, while its deterioration illustrates limitations in the recognition and protection of modernist heritage in Istanbul. Its hierarchical layout, period-specific materials, and recollections enrich understandings of elite domesticity in mid-20th-century Istanbul. Its documentation as one of the rare surviving garden-villa examples in Şaşkınbakkal offers insights into construction practices, urban memory, and the limited recognition of modernist heritage. The research identifies legal protection, emergency stabilization, and community engagement as potential measures for addressing the building’s current condition and status, while positioning the villa as a surviving material reference within a substantially transformed urban landscape and contributing to architectural historiography on vulnerable modernist sites, urban change, and contemporary heritage debates.