One of the first commissions of the architects Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and Wilhelm Schütte, who emigrated to Istanbul in 1938, was a festive decoration for the 15th anniversary of the Turkish Republic on 29 October 1938: a temporary street architecture was to be built at the beginning of the Galata Bridge in Karaköy. The commission was arranged by the Berlin architect Bruno Taut, who was also in exile in Istanbul and who had brought the pair to work on the construction of the offices of the Ministry of Education. The design produced by Schütte-Lihotzky and Schütte makes reference to the Turkish modernism of Şevki Balmumcu’s exhibition hall in Ankara. Balmumcu's design, which combines an elongated horizontal structure with a vertically rising tower, was considered an architectural beacon for the dawn of Turkish modernism. The same formal language can be found in the sewage treatment plant at the Çubuk Dam near Ankara, which was built in 1935, and in Ankara's main railway station, built two years later.

The architects were probably familiar with all three buildings, having visited Ankara in September 1938. At the same time, the two apparently received essential inspiration for the design from their stay of several years in the Soviet Union, where ephemeral permanent buildings were part of the repertoire of state-commissioned art. Propaganda was conveyed through quotations and inscriptions, and ephemeral buildings such as grandstands and kiosks were used as a means of media communication. Words and easily decipherable symbols conveyed political messages. Schütte and Schütte-Lihotzky were probably familiar with the buildings of agitprop, at least from tradition.

The Karaköy street decoration, which has been preserved in numerous photographs and a colour drawing, is reminiscent of Russian festive architecture. The Roman numerals “XV” and the initials “TC”, which stand for Türkiye Cumhuriyeti [Turkish Republic], can be found on the tower and on the banners flying above the street. The crescent and star are symbols of Turkey. Schüttes combined the verticality of the street with the horizontality of the tower, which was visible from afar and on which illuminated written signs referred to the object of the festive act.
The festive architecture was erected in the immediate vicinity of the state-owned Ziraat Bank at the end of the Galata Bridge in the Karaköy district. A photograph owned by the city planner Gustav Oelsner and taken by the Istanbul photo studio Sender shows a bird's eye view of the Galata Bridge, which connects historic Stanbul with the European-influenced districts of Beyoğlu and Galata. The Karaköy ferry terminal is also located there. The festival architecture designed by Schütte-Lihotzky and Schütte was thus located at a traffic junction and so visible to many Istanbul residents, even at night.

Wilhelm Schütte’s photographs point to another aspect of the political staging of architecture: the use of electric light was intended to generate new sensory impressions. The term “architecture of the night”, coined only a short time earlier, in 1930, by the American architect Raymond Hood (Neumann 2006, 18), referred to the new possibilities of perception through the illumination of buildings. Since the late 19th century, effective lighting had already contributed to dramatic stagings of architecture at world exhibitions – the example of the radiant Eiffel Tower is particularly striking. In Turkey, “light architecture” (Oechslin 1988) was used as a contemporary means of staging and at the same time as a political sign: modernity and the founding of the republic, mechanisation and reformism can be read as a metatext in the festive architecture. The illuminated Roman numerals “XV” and the initials “TC” on the tower are particularly visible at night and from afar.

A further ephemeral decoration executed by a German-speaking architect was Wilhelm Schütte’s November 1938 temporary architecture for Istanbul’s Taksim Square on the occasion of Atatürk’s funeral. This has survived in Schütte’s list of works (Schütte 1938/39).