Unlike in Western Europe and North America, where modernity was the result of a societal, cultural, and artistic evolutionary process spanning many centuries, in Turkey it took on the character of a national project. This project was inherently contradictory, as the young republic pursued two difficult-to-reconcile goals: to align Turkey with the West while simultaneously differentiating it from it. This study analyzes various aspects of this endeavor through the example of a single actor from that time - the Swiss-Austrian architect Ernst Arnold Egli. Many of his buildings for Ankara were situated in urban no man's land during their creation. It is precisely this pioneering approach - the palpable marking of the new capital in the Anatolian desert captured in the photographs of the era.