Sakarya (Nuri Conker) Apartment: Reading the Dwelling Culture on Anafartalar Street in the 1920s through a Building and Multiple Actors

This study focuses on Sakarya (Nuri Conker) Apartment, an important apartment building in the formation of the housing culture on Anafartalar Street. Sakarya Apartment Building belongs to Nuri Conker (1882-1937), a childhood and school friend of Atatürk. As with many residential buildings on Anafartalar Street in the 1920s, the ground floor of the apartment building was used as commercial and the upper floors as residential. In this context, the study first discusses the housing culture on Anafartalar Street through the apartmentization process. Then, it aims to read the Sakarya Apartment Building through the multiple actors involved in the production, construction and utilization process of the building. Nuri Conker and his family, the owner of the apartment building, the Ottoman Bank as the lending institution, Atatürk as the guarantor of the loan, and the tenants from three different periods; Eyüp Sabri Tuncer Colognes, Foto Aile and Keyman Design are selected and analyzed among the multiple actors of the apartment building. The selected actors are important in terms of providing stories that enable us to understand the semantic and spatial equivalent of the building in daily life practices. Literature review and analysis of archival documents constitute the methodology of the research. It has been observed that the production process of the building gains importance with the ownership of Sakarya Apartment Building by the Conker family, and that it is one of the first examples with its construction technology and space typology while providing a spatial background to the transforming socio-economic environment of the period. It is possible to say that it is both an architectural and cultural document as a registered apartment building that houses Eyüp Sabri Tuncer Colognes, one of the important brands of the Republic, and embodies the modernization practices of the period.