W1. Terrain Vague
Location: Karaköy, Istanbul I April 2015 I Ins. Cem Kozar, PATTU
Team: Deniz G., Deniz S., Eylül Y., Görkem K., Irmak G., Nil V., Serra S.
Large-scale urban developments are generally doomed to fail. We can see their examples all over the city. On the other hand, bottom-up, temporary usages give activists, architects, or planners the opportunities to experiment with functions, search for unconventional solutions, and allow quick and flexible responses.
The notion of temporariness is not really central to architectural discourse. Being durable is one of the main things we expect from a building. But if we look at the city, it is full of ephemeral structures. Temporariness fills voids caused by failed urban policies. Karaköy is full with these voids. First, the voids were created because of the incidents of 6-7 September, where most of the Greek shop owners left the area, later during the M. destructions and more recently, in the late 80'ies by D. who demolished the seafront and cut off basic infrastructure to force the local shop owners to go to the newly constructed PERPA. On the other hand, all of these top-down and failed urban policies resulted in very rich informal and temporary urbanisms. Now there is again pressure on the site, right now it is slow and hidden, but soon we will probably start to see big hotel developments in the area. And all of these creative ways of using the street and its voids will be gone. What can we learn from space? How can this affect the future? were some of the questions we asked. Humans, on the other hand, who are more temporary than buildings, have habits and certain patterns of space occupation, that are long-lasting than the buildings themselves. The buildings or the whole space might change, but unless something really dramatic happens, as it happened in Tarlabaşı or Sulukule where the entire population was forced out, they will continue to invent these creative ways of space usages, no matter what the urban texture is.
So in the workshop, we tried to uncover these patterns of creative usage of voids and space. For this, we worked a bit like archaeologists. In archaeology in just 1 m deep pit there can be layers and layers of history that can go back thousands of years. A trained eye can spot these layers but you need to know what you are looking for. To do that we created 3 groups: Stalkers, Situation Spotters, and Mappers. And each day the people in the group changed.
The notion of temporariness is not really central to architectural discourse. Being durable is one of the main things we expect from a building. But if we look at the city, it is full of ephemeral structures. Temporariness fills voids caused by failed urban policies. Karaköy is full with these voids. First, the voids were created because of the incidents of 6-7 September, where most of the Greek shop owners left the area, later during the M. destructions and more recently, in the late 80'ies by D. who demolished the seafront and cut off basic infrastructure to force the local shop owners to go to the newly constructed PERPA. On the other hand, all of these top-down and failed urban policies resulted in very rich informal and temporary urbanisms. Now there is again pressure on the site, right now it is slow and hidden, but soon we will probably start to see big hotel developments in the area. And all of these creative ways of using the street and its voids will be gone. What can we learn from space? How can this affect the future? were some of the questions we asked. Humans, on the other hand, who are more temporary than buildings, have habits and certain patterns of space occupation, that are long-lasting than the buildings themselves. The buildings or the whole space might change, but unless something really dramatic happens, as it happened in Tarlabaşı or Sulukule where the entire population was forced out, they will continue to invent these creative ways of space usages, no matter what the urban texture is.
So in the workshop, we tried to uncover these patterns of creative usage of voids and space. For this, we worked a bit like archaeologists. In archaeology in just 1 m deep pit there can be layers and layers of history that can go back thousands of years. A trained eye can spot these layers but you need to know what you are looking for. To do that we created 3 groups: Stalkers, Situation Spotters, and Mappers. And each day the people in the group changed.
-from the project booklet
Maps
The maps were taken from the Atatürk Library and the Galata Archive. Then, based on the Galata Tower, different map layers were overlapped and the changes in the buildings, streets and coastline were determined.
Stalking
On the other hand, the ways people used and the purpose of coming to the region were researched. Interviewed with tourists and results are marked on the map with different colors.
Situation Observation
At this stage, the focus was on the Perşembe Pazarı area. Daily habits of the local user in the area were recorded.
Sketches
The project was created during the international workshop called Ecoweek 2015 Istanbul.
