This is the first guidebook to cover the recent architecture of a city best known for its medieval and earlier heritage. Istanbul is not a museum, but a dynamic and rapidly growing city. While an understanding of the monuments of its Byzantine and Ottoman eras is essential for its appreciation, and this book offers descriptions of key works from these periods, to ignore the achievements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is to miss a vast body of rich exciting building.
Many styles, each reworked with a particular Istanbul vision, are represented, from the eclecticism of the nineteenth century through the first national movement and international modernism of the 1920s and 1930s to the second national movement of the 1940s, which used classical forms with a regional inflection.