Profile | KEMAL AHMET ARU (1912-2005)

Kemal Ahmet Aru as Dean of the Faculty of Architecture (1954).
Mavi Boncuk |


KEMAL AHMET ARU (1912-2005)  
architect and urban planner 


In 1932, after studying architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Professor Kemal Ahmet Aru entered the Higher School of Engineering (later ITU). During his academic career and activities here and in the Istanbul Technical University (ITU), he contributed to the great changes that were taking place in Turkey in architecture and town planning, to which he also bore witness. The photograph album compiled by Kemal Ahmet Aru gives interesting details of this long process. These pictures, many of which are published for the first time, will serve as a memorial to foreign architects such as Clemens Holzmeister, Luigi Piccinato and Paul Bonatz, who set their stamp on the period, as well as to distinguished Turkish architects like Emin Onat and Orhan Safa. It also serves as evidence of the effect on the university atmosphere of events in the 1950s and 1960s as reflected in the photographs of the various visits paid to the Technical University by politicians such as Celal Bayar and Adnan Menderes, the various opening ceremonies and meetings of the senate. The album also includes small but very interesting details concerning the design of the First Bosphorus Bridge, the Technical University campus at Ayazaga, the Garden City Scheme in 4th Levent.


"In 1940 I entered the School of Architecture, newly founded by Prof. Emin Onat, who had recently returned from the ETH in Switzerland. In 1943, on his return from Switzerland, after practising the type of contemporary architectural training on the French models organised by Prof. Debb in the Higher School of Engineering, Emin Onat initiated a German model of architectural training. It was then, in 1946, that Orhan Safa and I were appointed assistants in the School of Architecture." "Following the decision made by Emin Onat, I began work together with Prof. Gustav Oelsner as an assistant professor in the Department of Town Planning in the School of Architecture. With the establishment by the Faculty of Engineering of a Town Planning Institute in 1960-1970, town planning gradually moved outside the domain of the architectural context." Kemal Ahmet Aru, "


Kemal Ahmet Aru - Bir Universite Hocasının Yasamının 80 Yılı", p. 43-44, Building & Industry Centre (YEM) Publications, Istanbul 2001.