Timothy Hyde
Landed Internationals is an invaluable contribution to the growing understanding of the global practices of development in the twentieth century. This fascinating 'archaeology of encounters' renders in fine detail the equivocal role of international experts in the technical and political environment of Turkey. Proposing a novel paradigm of training and education as a central nexus through which to see critical actions and transformative agents, Erdim gives insights that vividly illuminate his case study while also offering broad relevance for histories of the twentieth century.
Annabel Jane Wharton
Landed Internationals is an important text. It provides an intimate, thoroughly documented, and well-crafted history of one of the modern Middle East’s most important educational institutions, the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. In the process of examining this school’s emergence in the aftermath of World War II, Burak Erdim persuasively integrates the architectural, technological, political, and ideological negotiations involved in realizing a remarkably complex project. This book provides a model of a comprehensive biography of a major built site and a fascinating narrative of the architectural expression of the problems of an emerging state.
Sibel Zandi-Sayek
Focusing on a fascinating yet understudied project, Landed Internationals offers an empirically rich, materially grounded, and transnationally informed study. Mining unpublished and largely unknown sources, Burak Erdim masterfully portrays the planning of the Middle East Technical University as a series of shifting coalitions among agents and agencies working across Cold War geographies. This is a truly original contribution to the history of postwar architecture and planning, the long and multifaceted history of Turkish-American relations, and the growing field of Cold War Studies.
