İhsan Bilgin, when he was my teacher in the Faculty of Architecture at Yıldız Technical University, was about the age I am now. I can see him walking slowly down the corridor, his indispensable Gitanes in his hand. In the studio, at the lectern, in the garden, he always had a halo of smoke about him, and a curious group of listeners around him. What I learned from him is also the ground of the things I am curious about today. It was a privilege to hear from him the history of building production after the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, the capitals of Europe, the construction of the new Berlin. After I graduated he left Yıldız. At Bilgi University, where he carried his vision, he had succeeded in organising towards one aim five talented people who were nothing like one another, with wholly different agendas, egos and values. He had succeeded in putting the university on the radar in Türkiye, and the young faculty of architecture among the schools that are accepted as the traditional ones. In another world, in a developed European country for example, I am sure he would have been a very successful minister, or someone in local government.
For the building project of the sixth semester we had worked in Dolapdere, on the land where Bilgi University stands now. As the custom was, we went with the project group to see the site. To walk that layered Dolapdere, still carrying the traces of Ağır Roman, with İhsan Hoca was marvellous.
As we talked on the way I mentioned, at one point, an underground bar I had gone to inside the furniture-makers' market. That bar, truly among the excluded and those outside official life, a haunt of actors and of artists, was an exact photograph of the Türkiye of the 2000s. He had me stand on a high stone, had me tell what I had lived and what I felt, taught me to explain place and architecture through life itself, and helped me find my own voice. A photograph of that moment existed somewhere. It has been lost. The trace of it will stay with me. He was one of those teachers who are admired, who make you want to know as much as they know, to tell and to understand as they do, who open new windows and stir your curiosity (and you know how rare that is; one seems hardly to meet it any more).
İhsan Bilgin, also known as Uzun İhsan, has left us. I am grieving. My condolences to his family, first of all to Tansel Bilgin Hoca, to everyone who loves him, and to our world of architecture and culture.
In the lives we led before the age of social media, it is as if there is nothing. Of close friends, of people who hold an important place in our lives, of old lovers, we have in hand perhaps a few photographs if we are lucky, and next to no footage. From the vantage of a world today in which almost every bite and every encounter is on record, this looks rather surprising. Among people of my age, though, I am one of the rare ones who has a full album from infancy. People forget quickly.
For that reason, when dear Emine Merdim Yılmaz shared this video with me after İhsan Hoca, I was both surprised and very glad. In the "Conversations over Coffee" at the 1st Architecture Festival, which Arkitera held in 2004, I am at the same table as Mehmet Konuralp and İhsan Bilgin. With the inexperience of my twenty-five years I am talking to Konuralp about Buckminster Fuller, and to İhsan Bilgin about "gentrification". Were it today, I could not open my mouth. If you have the time and you watch, you too will admire İhsan Hoca's grace, his sincerity, his modesty and his knowledge. Konuralp is another world in any case. Let him be a matter for another day. On this occasion I want to thank Arkitera Mimarlık Merkezi. For our architectural circle, which is today familiar with events, to put it in the mildest terms, how innovative an "Architecture Festival" was then, and how it opened the mind. I am grateful.