The exiled architects Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897–2000) and Wilhelm Schütte (1900–1968) lived in an apartment in Gümüşsuyu/Kabataş, on the European side of Istanbul from 1938. The flat has been preserved in numerous photographs, allowing the interior design to be reconstructed. The view of the Bosporus from the balcony was spectacular.

The Viennese architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the German architect Wilhelm Schütte, who specialised in school construction, met in Frankfurt am Main in 1926, where they were both employed in the structural engineering department under Ernst May. Together they contributed to the modern restructuring of the city, which was widely perceived as the “New Frankfurt”. With May, the two architects went to Moscow to participate in the building of new Soviet cities. On a trip to Japan they visited Bruno Taut, who was in exile there and would later find them a position in Turkey. In 1937, Schütte-Lihotzky and Schütte had to leave the Soviet Union but, due to the political situation, could not return to Germany and emigrated to Paris. In 1938 they accepted an offer from Bruno Taut to work under his direction at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts and the buildings department of the Turkish Ministry of Education. Taut had in 1938 already had two years of intensive school and university building activity in Turkey, and was also teaching as a professor of architecture. That same year, he built his own house in Ortaköy and published his textbook Mimarî Bilgisi.  

In Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and Wilhelm Schütte, the Turkish Ministry of Education  recruited professionals with many years of international experience in school construction and for the architects themselves their Turkish exile offered an opportunity to continue their work in school building reform. Soon after their arrival, they made visits to a number of village schools in the wider vicinity of Ankara and Istanbul. Schütte-Lihotzky's began to design expandable village schools constructed of earth and air-dried bricks which could be built by the villagers themselves under the instruction of specialists. On behalf of the Ministry of Education, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky developed concepts for the construction of typified village schools, which were published in a brochure in 1939. It is presumed that these schools were built in large numbers in rural Turkey. Employing typical 1920s' approaches to school building reform, Schütte-Lihotzky also conceived a plan for the expansion of a girls grammar school in Ankara, though this was never realised. Immediately after their arrival Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and Wilhem Schütte designed an ephemeral festive architecture to mark the 15th anniversary of the founding of the republic, which was erected at the end of Galata Bridge in October 1938.  

From mid-1939, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky ceased working for the Ministry, but continued as a freelance architect. In 1939/40, she submitted several residential building designs, some in cooperation with Wilhelm Schütte (Flierl 2021, 447), including a draft for the archeologist Halet Çambel, who was responsible for the translation of two essays by Wilhelm Schütte in the journal Arkitekt (Schütte 1941a; 1943c). She also co-designed the Lütfi Tozan House (Ankara), was responsible for the Nusret Evcen House (Istanbul) and the Dr Kemal Özsan House (Istanbul). Özsan was a doctor who ran a practice for urology and skin diseases in Istiklal Caddesi, Tünelbaşı and the house designed for him by Schütte-Lihotzky envisaged a lodger flat on the lowest residential floor, which could be used as a doctor's office. The parents' and children's bedrooms on the upper floor were connected and the reception rooms were located on the first floor. Unfortunately, none of Schütte-Lihotzky's house designs were ever built.

Her time in Turkey led to Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's politicisation and in 1939 she became a member of the Communist Party Austria (KPÖ) and joined a resistance circle led by the architect Herbert Eichholzer (for details see Flierl 2021, 478–486). On a clandestine courier trip to Vienna at the end of 1940 and beginning of 1941, she was arrested, narrowly escaped execution and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
Wilhelm Schütte and Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky remained in contact through letters, which, due to censorship, often contained coded messages, but also detailed descriptions of Schütte's life in Turkey (Schütte-Lihotzky/Schütte 2021).
From December 1939 until his departure in 1946, Wilhelm Schütte was also employed as a lecturer, and since 1941 professor, at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts and taught a large number of architecture students, among them Muhlis Türkmen and Ercüment Tarcan, who still felt connected to him decades later. In Turkey, Schütte was also active as an author, writing essays on the history of architecture, on current architectural challenges in his country of exile, and on the education of young architects.

He published ten articles in the architectural journal Arkitekt, in which he developed programmatic approaches to his teaching activities. He devoted himself to central figures of European architectural history such as Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Adolf Loos and Theodor Fischer (Schütte 1940c; 1941a; 1943) believing that the architectural approach of these men and, above all, their intellectual attitude were of relevance for the Turkish present. Schütte clearly intended to provide an intellectual education for the young Turkish architects, which he considered fundamental for their practical work. One of his essays in particular, “Mimar Yetiştirimi” [Education as an Architect] from 1943, can be read as programmatic. (Schütte 1943c). This article, published in German in 1953 in the magazine Aufbau and titled “Erziehung zum Architekten” (Schütte 1953), provides an insight into Schütte's teaching methods. The teacher's first task, he believed, was to impart knowledge of building materials, mechanics, construction and purpose, social and political contexts, which must then be followed by the stimulation of ideas and creative development.
In his contributions to Arkitekt, Wilhelm Schütte addressed himself to the huge building construction challenge of earthquakes in Turkey. After the 1939 Erzincan earthquake catastrophe the director of the Academy of Fine Arts, Burhan Toprak, sent Wilhelm Schütte to the earthquake site to write a report on reconstruction. This report was published in the magazine Arkitekt in 1940 and was followed by another contribution in 1943 (Schütte 1940a; 1943b). Schütte was to write several reports on the extent of the building and city damage and on reconstruction measures.

After his wife's arrest and imprisonment, Wilhelm Schütte lived alone for several years, but from 1943 shared his apartment with a view at the Bosporus with the art historian Ernst Diez, a professor at Istanbul University and the author of the controversial book Türk Sanatı, published in 1946. Ernst Diez described the remarkable view from the apartment in a letter: “From my seat, as from every point in my five-by-five-and-a-half-metre room, I look down on the Bosporus, which is only thirty metres below and about fifty metres away as the crow flies. So one lives almost directly on the water. The Bosporus is about 3 kilometres wide, and on the opposite side are Scutari and the mountain ranges of Anatolia. Down in the water, however, the steamers, sailors and motorboats are always quietly making their way, because they are so far away that you can't hear their noise, but only see them pass by. Large ships are moored further out – now already with their nocturnal lights. It is 6 o'clock in the evening, summer time, and just the last twilight. So our house front is south, parallel with the Bosporus, or better south-east. The sun rises behind the opposite mountain ranges and shines on us until early afternoon. Immediately to the right of our terrace is a small, still freshly green meadow with an ancient, mighty pine tree through whose branches we look out to the south-west onto the Sea of Marmara, where the Princes' Islands appear in the distance. Since the terraced gardens in front of us are almost hidden from view by only one street without shops – the road that leads along the shore of the Bosporus to the Black Sea – we are completely protected from the city noise, which is particularly bad here due to the criers of all kinds of food and the shouting newspaper boys, as well as the constantly honking car drivers, and which can also be heard disturbingly upstairs in the Archaeological Institute. Our house, one of the numerous apartment buildings that are springing up everywhere in place of the old small Turkish wooden houses, is situated on the steep slope that descends from the height of Taksim Square to the sea, and it is already quite low down, almost at the foot of this ridge.” (Diez 1943, translated from German).

The five-room flat that was the home of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and Wilhelm Schütte, and where Ernst Diez lived for a time, was located in the Cili Kira evi (Cili Apartman or Cili Apartment house) in the residential district of Gümüşsuyu/Kabataş in the European part of Istanbul, not far from Taksim Square (this district also became a home for the Russian photographer Jules Kanzler). The building was designed by Zeki Sayar, aspiring architect and editor of Arkitekt magazine (see Flierl 2021, 449f.) which published a multi-page feature on Cili Kira evi in 1936. This provided information on the building’s contemporary exterior, as well as floor plans and interior views, and also featured the building's location on a steep slope above the Bosporus which enabled the magnificent sea views that pertained from the garden side. According to Thomas Flierl's reconstruction, the couple’s flat was on the ground-floor of Cili Kira evi.

Photographs of the flat show a contemporary European interior. Some of the furniture in the living room had been designed by Schütte himself and in the work area we can see a typewriter, on which he may have written his articles for Arkitekt. The transcultural experience of Schütte and his now-absent wife are inscribed in the design of the dining room, on whose walls hang kakemono in vertical orientation, i.e. tatejiku. This genre originated through close cultural exchange between Japan and China and was used in tea house design. The wall scroll prints were easy to transport and so a popular souvenir for travellers. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and Wilhelm Schütte probably acquired theirs when they visited Bruno Taut in Japan in 1934. Particularly striking are the views of the Bosporus from the wide-windowed living room and especially from the balcony. The apartment was within walking distance (10 minutes) of the Academy of Fine Arts, where Schütte taught, and was also well connected by tram to Istanbul University, where Ernst Diez worked (he also gave lectures at the academy).
After Turkey, which had long been neutral, cut diplomatic relations with Germany in August 1944 and shortly afterwards entered the Second World War on the side of the Allies, numerous Germans and Austrians were interned in Anatolian towns. In 1944 Ernst Diez was interned in Kırşehir, while Wilhelm Schütte was taken to Yozgat, together with 260 other internees. The architect used his time there to design an extension to the grammar school in Yozgat. The adjoining boarding school building was to accommodate 200 pupils (Demir 2008, 325). Schütte also successfully organised a public library with more than 200 books, to provide a diversion and some spiritual edification in a tense situation (Anhegger 1945).

After his release from internment in June 1946, Schütte did not return to his apartment in Kabataş, but lived in the Saylan Apartman on the Asian side of Istanbul, in the Kandilli/Üsküdar district (Demir 2008, 317). He had already organised his return to Vienna while still in Yozgat and, at the end of 1946, met up with his wife, who had been released from prison, in Sofia and they travelled back to Vienna together at the beginning of 1947. The two separated in 1951 and followed independent careers as freelance architects, occasionally working on joint projects.