This paper focuses on the complex relationship between the physical and emotional landscapes of the Children’s Palace in the capital city, Ankara, in the late 1920s. The Children’s Palace, the headquarters and administrative center of the Children’s Protection Society (CPS), acted as a complex. It included a daycare center, an outdoor playground, a swimming pool, dormitory, soup kitchen, public and private baths, a library for children, a dispensary for children, dental clinic, a milk center, and a conference room. The Children’s Palace was an experimental and exceptional architectural structure. It borrowed elements from Ottoman charity institutions, yet it was more a product of its time. It was deeply connected with the rising hygiene movement in the interwar era, imagined and designed to be in conversation with French puericulture, eugenics, and reflected the Turkish state’s concerns about population (and depopulation) in the late 1920s. This research first observes the physical landscape where the Children’s Palace was located, and secondly, it questions the symbolic architecture, and its emotional landscape. The Children’s Palace, with its architectural grandeur, was placed in a spatial hierarchy and acquired a political mission – it displayed the success and the national pride of the new Turkish Republic in keeping pace with European institutions of child welfare and health. Ironically, the profile of the children who enjoyed this space was different from the profile of children for whom this space was designed for; orphans, destitute, and sick children. For children whose paths crossed with the Children’s Protection Society, the building offered a different emotional landscape, defined by loss, pain, trauma, and helplessness. For the mothers who had to leave their babies in the care of the Children’s Protection Society, this was a space associated with pain, shame, and desperation. This paper focuses on the discrepancies between the physical and emotional landscapes of the Children’s Palace. It aims to offer a fresh perspective using emotions and oral history to interpret the spatial hierarchy of charity, welfare, and nationalism in Turkey in the late 1920s.