MİMARLIK AGENDA

"Beyoğlu Culture Route" from Galataport to the New Atatürk Cultural Center / Esin Köymen

The Beyoğlu Culture Route Project, which has come to the agenda again with the opening ceremony and festival held in the recent months, is the promotional name of a route that connects the recently re-built Atatürk Cultural Center with Galataport. The author reviews this route, which the public opinion mostly tackles through current developments instead of resorting to a historical and critical approach, by recalling the urban struggles that have been fought for years at each station.

COMMEMORATION

After Fatin Uran / Funda Uz

Fatin Uran, a member of the Chamber of Architects with registration number 27, passed away on November 24th, 2021. He graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in 1946, ITU, and opened his office after 3 years. He taught in the Faculty of Civil Engineering, ITU between 1957 and 1981 as a lecturer. By adopting the principles of rationality, function, simplicity and harmony, Uran completed architectural projects of Süreyyapaşa Workers' Sanatorium (Istanbul), İlbank Yapı Kooperatif Sitesi (Ankara), İzmir Büyük Efes Hotel (İzmir), The Marmara Hotel (Istanbul), El Mahari Hotel (Libya), Akmerkez Shopping Center / Hotel (Istanbul). Funda Uz wrote a text in memoriam.

AGENDA

• Transformation of the İzmit SEKA Factory: From Producing the "Dough of Civilization" to Becoming a "Cultural Basin" / T. Gül Köksal

Paper, the raw material of printed publications in Turkey, is fully dependent on exports and therefore directly affected by shifting exchange rates. When news appeared last November regarding this new project, the author “rolls up her sleeves” and writes her take on the history of İzmit SEKA as it overlapped with the transformation of the dominant ideologies in Turkey.

• An Example of Conservation Struggles in Historical and Urban Change: the Validebağ Grove / Deniz Alkan

The Validebağ Grove, which bore witness to the city’s history for many years in Üsküdar, Istanbul, is now under the threat of "regulation and rehabilitation" following the planned national garden project. The author discusses the pioneering struggle of the volunteers who fought the institutions responsible for protecting the region in their attempts to "destroy the Validebağ Grove, deteriorate the quality of the grove, and pave the way for construction" through the historical process of the area.

• Formation, Dissolution and Reconstruction: Konak Square Unidentified for Two Centuries / Feyzal Avcı Özkaban

Konak Square, having a crucial place in Izmir's urban memory, underlines the history of commonality because throughout history, it has received a lot of attention. The author, shedding light on the past of the square within the context of issues of void-square, civil-administrative, historical-modern, emphasizes the necessity of dealing with all layers of the area (and their meanings), which is currently undergoing yet another process of “redefinition”.

EVENT

• İzmir Livened Up “with design” This Summer / Şebnem Yücel

The author, who provides a brief but comprehensive background on the process of Izmir becoming a city of design / world design capital, evaluates the "tasarım ile / with design" project and the activities carried out within the scope of the project discussing its purposes and impacts.

• Seeking Bursa Bey's Palace in Tomorrow: Discussions on Carrying Multilayered Cultural Heritage Sites into the Future / Ayten Başdemir Taciroğlu, Gün Işık

The event “Discussions on Carrying Multi-Layered Cultural Heritage Sites into the Future” held between 1 - 30 May 2021, is the first phase of a long-term process of urban struggle. The authors, who address the issue in order to extend the debate to various other platforms as well, draw attention to the importance of being involved in a process that adopts "interdisciplinary, multi-participatory and transparent" approaches.

THE CONGRESS OF ARCHITECTURE AND EDUCATION

Solidarity and Change in Architecture, Face to Face Again / Aktan Acar

The 11th Architecture and Education Congress was held in Eskişehir on 26-27 November, bearing the theme "Change / Solidarity in Architecture Education and Practice", allowing for both physical and online participation.  The author reviews the agenda of the congress by looking from the two-year "emergency-distance" education process in which the borders of reality and fiction faded.

BIENNIAL

17th Venice Architecture Biennale

• An Assessment for the Venice Biennale / Mesut Dinler
• Steps and Four Rooms: The Biennale's Stories from the Lived Past and the Future of Our Dreams / B. Beril Kapusuz Balcı

The 2021 pandemic edition of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Hashim Sarkis, took place at Giardini and Arsenal with the theme of “How Will We Live Together?”. Considering the increasing visibility of political divisions and economic inequalities, the Biennial invites us to imagine and discuss places where we can live together. In the Turkey Pavillion, the ‘Architecture as Measure’ installation curated by Neyran Turan is called Four Dioramas. The question of “Instead of reducing the role of design to simply producing solutions to the problem of climate change, can we think of architecture as a measure by which the environment is re-imagined?” shaped the pavilion, made up of an installation, web publishing and storytelling. Detailed information can be accessed at https://pavilionofturkey21.iksv.org/tr.

FILE: MEMORY AND SPACE

• A Reading Suggestion for Practices of Establishing Spatial Memory / Funda Uz
• Memory of Place, Place of Memory: Museums as Occupiers of Space / Burçak Madran
• Memory, Collective Memory and Conservation* / Pınar Aykaç
• Remembering W. G. Sebald for a Little While: Rings of Saturn: Fragments from the Cartography of Short-Term Memory on a Pilgrimage to England / Erdem Ceylan

Memory is one of the concepts that has been analyzed by the social and human sciences, which have examined the modernization process experienced since the 19th century. In these file, which offers a broad framework extending from individual memory to collective memory shaped by social and public identity and to the cultural memory formed by this unity, the relationship of historical continuity, reaching from past to present and future, with space also gains importance. Memory can only be accessed when experienced; it can correspond to the traces of life, to movement; that is, time itself, in space.

The relationship design maintains with history has always been a critical field for architects in every period; consenting or questioning answers have been put forward to tackle this relationship within the discipline of architecture. The assessments put forward by the social and human sciences on the relationship between time and space forms a basis for thinking about the social meanings of buildings as design objects, and offer new perspectives on similar discussions in the field of architecture. Although the relationship of collective memory with architecture and the city has been emphasized since the writings of Maurice Halbwachs in the first half of the 20th century, the scholarship that examines the meaning of historical spaces for societies and the practices of losing or preserving these spaces, evolved within the framework drawn by Pierre Nora and Christine Boyer from the 1990s on.

Within the context of Turkey, where a rapid social and urban transformation process has been experienced recently, it would appear as if the relationship between memory and space has gained even more importance, as can be seen from the increasing number of studies, especially in the 2000s. Having this in mind, the question of how the architectural object and architectural space are defined becomes more relevant, since the former shapes a society’s collective memory as an image remembered, and the latter creates its own temporal knowledge within the urban memory thanks to its function, infrastructure or the habits of its users. In other words, answers to questions such as what can gain ground in spatial memory, as well as how or why; or whose spatial memory is descriptive and whose is not, also become more relevant.

In this file, which aims to create a discussion field about spatial memory and its narrative, Funda Uz examines the emergence of multiple narratives in the process of the spatialization of memory or the establishment of space by remembering, as the concepts relate to each other, “human” as the subject in recording; “time-space” establishing the experience via remembering and reminding; and “archive” as the material of this whole establishment.

Burçak Madran, on the other hand, discusses how the production of the past, present and future can be reconsidered within a new scale and type of content, especially in the museum space and the construction of the memory it produces, in the era of globalization, which correlates to a certain place, and is linked to the disappearance of a sense of historical past-tradition.

Focusing on the "spatial nature of society", which is based on the relationship between the concepts of collective memory and cultural heritage, Pınar Aykaç evaluates how actors on different scales are reproduced by the attitudes of conservation that are helpful for remembering as well as against forgetting.

In the article, Erdem Ceylan approaches the borders that emerge along the journey as we gain access to the past whilst in the company of short-term memory, between time-space, memory-history, geography-journey, topography-architecture, people-objects and death-life, as blurring narrative and imageries.

Based on the different perspectives of these articles examining the relationship between memory and space, the mere act of answering a relatively simple question like “where are memories / recollections accumulated and preserved?” forces us to think about memory through space; it requires understanding and considering the changing dimensions of the different individual or social understandings of memory, shaped by spatial references. This file has been shaped by such contemporary discussions on the relationship between memory and place, we are hoping that it will open the door to new assessments.

File Editors: T. Elvan Altan, Nurbin Paker

ARCHITECTURE-DEMOCRACY-PARTICIPATION

Spaces of Commoning / Pelin Tan

The author, who refers to the networks constituted by ongoing commoning practices as “threshold infrastructures”, studies the civil struggles of collective initiatives that have become independent from the stereotypical definitions of urban participation and democracy.

AWARDS

Antakya Köprübaşı Urban Square and Its Surroundings Urban Design Project Competition

The urban design project competition organized by the Hatay Metropolitan Municipality has concluded. Its aim was to open an urban space that offers a high quality of life; socially, physically and visually integrates with areas of the natural and cultural life in the city center; takes advantage of the site’s multi-faceted and multi-layered potentials in the area that is located within the historical urban fabric of Antakya above the Asi River and on the east of Atatürk Bridge, which is in the city center. In the competition (which was freelance, national and single-stage) 58 projects were taken into consideration; 3 prizes, 3 honorable mentions were given, and 3 purchases were made.

CULTURAL HERITAGE IN DANGER

Memory Loss: The Iconic Office Building of Sedad Hakkı Eldem, Fındıklı Akbank General Directorate / Nezih Aysel

In this chapter of Cultural Heritage in Danger, a series which began in our 405th issue, Nezih Aysel wrote a piece on the building of Fındıklı Akbank General Directorate.

ARCHITECTURAL CRITICISM

A Timeless Archetype: Lucien Arkas Art Gallery / Burkay Pasin

The Lucien Arkas Art Gallery in Urla, İzmir, nominated for the “Building Category Award” in the 2020 National Architecture Awards, stands out with its particular nature, exploring new ways of communicating with the land and the user. The author reads this building as an interior/exterior experience through the archetype of exhibition architecture and the references of the material.

Architecture as a Reconciliation Skill: Super Energy Office / Aslı Şener

Super Energy Office, nominated for the “Building Category Award” in the 2020 National Architecture Awards, stands out for its ability to establish an optimal balance in the contexts it is in. The author draws attention to the fact that the success of architecture is possible by "being able to include every group, condition and situation in/with which it resides into the balance required by the project’s own subjective description as a harmonious whole; and to be able to provide a positive impact for its environs and users”.

A Dynamic Interface between the City and the Sea: Antalya Konyaaltı Beach Architectural and Coastal Rehabilitation Project / Hilal Tuğba Örmecioğlu, Aslı Er Akan

The Antalya Konyaaltı Beach Architectural and Coastal Rehabilitation Project, nominated for "Building / Environmental Design Award" in the 2020 National Architecture Awards, is particularly remarkable because it was acquired through a long-term competition process. Dealing with the changes that took place in the city after the implementation on (arguments relating to) various scales, the authors pay attention to the necessity of the complete implementation of the holistic area management program of the project, which offers a "vivid and attractive life".

CONTACT

Places out of Uncertainty / Hande Savaş

The Shanghai Floating City project was designed by the People's Architecture Office and implemented under the title of "Instant City" in Shenzhen, China, as part of the 2020 Future Urbanism / Architecture Exhibition. The author approaches the project as a post-pandemic urban/public space experience.

* English Summary by Elif Kaymaz