Arif Hikmet Koyunoğlu

Arif Hikmet Koyunoğlu (1893 to 1982) was an architect and photographer who worked in Istanbul and Ankara. He was born in Istanbul, a grandson of the poet and scholar Abdullah Refet Bey. His photographs record war, travel, family life, people and landscapes, and Seljuk and Ottoman buildings. He worked on glass negatives and acetates and made prints, from the 1900s and above all in the 1920s and 1930s. As an architect he is known for the Turkish Hearths building and the Ethnography Museum in Ankara.

His first camera, in 1903, was a black box seen in a stationer's window in Beyazıt. In 1906 he entered Vefa İdadisi and served an apprenticeship at the Phebus photography studio. He volunteered for the Balkan War in 1912. From 1915 he photographed architecture on the Eastern Front in the First World War. In March 1920 he set up the Underground Photography House on Bâbıâli Street. He also worked as a photojournalist for the paper İleri, then left for Ankara in 1921.

He came first in the 1910 entrance exam for architecture at the Sanâyi-i Nefîse Mektebi (Imperial School of Fine Arts), Istanbul. In 1923 he founded his firm Türk İnşaat Evi and built the Dumlupınar Monument. Work on the Ethnography Museum, Ankara, began in 1925. From 1926 to 1930 he built the Ministry of Education, the Children's Protection Society and the Turkish Hearths buildings in Ankara. Both the Hearths building and the museum follow the First National Architecture movement. In 1980 he became the first architect to receive the title of State Artist. His photographs are in the Arif Hikmet Koyunoğlu Photography Collection of the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation, held at the Istanbul Research Institute. The Institute's Gallery opened The Photography Studio of An Adventurous Architect, a posthumous solo exhibition, in 2025.