Sevin Yildiz

2011-06-22T21:28:00.005+03:00

I wrote a review on one of Turkey's emerging architects, Bogachan Dundaralp's works.It was published in the March 2011 edition of Arredamento Magazine.

Lunchbox in AD Magazine -Special Issue on Turkish Architecture

2011-04-07T05:18:00.006+03:00

Our Lunchbox project with Mert Eyiler was in the special Issue on Turkish Architecture from AD Magazine.

My new publication: How Green Really Was My Valley: Designing the Ecological Future of the Metropolis

2010-11-12T03:47:00.012+02:00

Here is the new publication of Arkitera Architecture Center in collaboration with London School of Economics, Urban Age.

Five Proactive Scenarios on Urbanization in Istanbul

My article is How Green Really Was My Valley: Designing the Ecological Future of the Metropolis Here is the link to the book on Urban Age website.

Grand Gesture of Reclaiming Ecology

2010-01-12T23:44:00.009+02:00

Grand Gesture of Reclaiming Ecology
Sevin Yildiz(Published in German in Arch+ Istanbul Issue 195 Title: Okologie Als Planunggestus )

Istanbul Metropolitan Planning’s (IMP) Urban Transformation Project Competition in 2006, brought a former seaside village, Küçükçekmece district under the spotlight of neoliberal urban transformation. Küçükçekmece with its geographical location would not be considered to be located anywhere near the center of the city 30 years ago. But the rapid urbanization of the city and the impacts of sprawl, moved beyond Küçükçekmece capturing it in a network of urban highways and infrastructure, the busiest one being the E-5 Highway. The urbanization past beyond Küçükçekmece over to Avcilar after 50s, did not help Küçükçekmece retain its small-scale village status as well. The immigrants –both internal and external- had their say in this rapid growth, making Küçükçekmece the 2nd densest (in population) municipality of Istanbul today. Despite its population density, the ecological formation of the Küçükçekmece Lagoon, creates a set of waterfront relations and perspectives that immediately isolate the center from the busy traffic connections. There is a stark contrast between the scale that surrounds you along the lagoon and the one once you are off along the E-5 highway. The dense building fabric gives away the clues of informal settlement, given that most of the buildings do not have permits here. The morphology of the streets and the left over urban spaces point out to the unresolved issues of property and infrastructure.Küçükçekmece is also no different than other eco-regions in the world that are stuck in between the urban infrastructure, mostly transportation, and estuary qualities. One similar example that comes to mind immediately would be Jamaica Bay in New York. The same kind of proximity to infrastructure –airport and highways- but then again in Küçükçekmece’s case, uncontrolled growth of the housing fabric, makes it difficult to read it like a complete estuary or a wildlife reservoir. Any plan or vision attempt also falls into this dilemma of retaining the urban quality while praising the eco potentials of the location. llewelyn Davies Yeang’s winning proposal for Küçükçekmece works along the same route, de-intensifying the traffic burden off the waterfront and trying to create a somehow parallel system of infrastructure along ecology. His recognition and emphasis of the ecological qualities of the area is not surprising however his highlighting of the micro public spaces and their fragmented qualities is really important in comparison to the other two finalists. It is obvious that these urban redevelopment projects are grand gestures of the municipalities and are intented not to be modest in scale. The redevelopment in Kartal’s and Küçükçekmece’s cases are not intented to be for local populations but rather for a new mobile upper class and internationals with marinas, grand concert halls and high-end accommodation opportunities. These ambitious briefs were molded in different strategies with the architects that competed for these two masterplans. Ken Yeang’s recognition of micro-spaces is a valuable part of his overall proposal as one can immediately diagnose the fragmentation of the fabric along the waterfront because of ownership and property issues. The coastline both on the seaside and along the lagoon is made up of disconnected pieces that grew autonomously over time. The organic nature of the streets along the lagoon front are the traces of the old village settlement there, some houses of which are transformed into profit making small cafes and public spaces. The visual connection to the sea is disabled with infill areas around the coastline and the imposed infrastructure. Beaches along the seafront point out to a present day recreational function especially with the municipal efforts of water cleaning in the last years. The beaches are the main densely used public spaces. The parks or so-called green islands are also deserted lacking proper paving or vegetation. There are last examples of an old industrial heritage – like the old French Match Factory – that seem not to be in the agenda of reuse.

The lack of a continuous strategy for these public waterfront access and the lack of functions and recreational options suppress the potential of the area up to a great extent. The informal building activity, also brought along an unresolved water and sewer infrastructure problem that hinders the water quality of the lagoon enormously. The changing route of migrating birds and the extinction of the certain species of fish are other ecological problems already present. One of the aims of Yeang’s proposal is to gradually retrieve the ecology destroyed. However the ambitious brief of the site, given by IMP, does not seem to allow for a transformation based on estuary qualities. The yacht marina and the hotels go beyond an ecological ambition and intend to open up Küçükçekmece to be a gate to the city by the waterfront. While Yeang’s scheme deals with the reclamation of the ecology, “green” should not be the sacred ground where the discussions are kept silent and no further questioning is made about the nature of the transformation and who the beneficiaries of these reclaimed ecology will be.

(Thank you Mert Eyiler for accompanying me in site expeditions!)

With Teddy Cruz on "Power" and "Powerlessness"

2009-11-04T22:26:00.011+02:00

Also on Archinect Now

Şevin Yıldız: On what level were you first involved in the continuous informal and formal exchange between Tijuana and San Diego? (Was it more on a policy level, the urban sprawl or the creative architectonics of the settlements?)

Teddy Cruz: Much of the research on the trans-border urbanisms that have informed my practice first began as simply a desire to critically observe the specificity of the San Diego – Tijuana border territory, how one oscillates back and forth between two radically different ways of constructing city. At no other international juncture in the world one can find some of the wealthiest real state as the one found in the edges of San Diego’s sprawl, barely twenty minutes away from some of the poorest settlements in Latin America, manifested by the many slums that dot the new periphery of Tijuana. These two different types of suburbia are emblematic of the incremental division of the contemporary city and the territory between enclaves of mega wealth and the rings of poverty that surround them. I am interested in processes of mediation that can produce critical interfaces between and across these opposites, exposing conflict as an operational devise to transform architectural practice. The critical observation of this locality transforms this border region into a laboratory from which to reflect the current politics of migration, labour and surveillance, the tensions between sprawl and density, formal and informal urbanisms, wealth and poverty, all of which incrementally is characterizing the contemporary city every where.

ŞY: Do you think San Diego and Tijuana constitute a “bi-national” urban planning problem or is it a problem that should first be addressed as a country-wide immigration policy problem?

TC: The Tijuana-San Diego bi-national planning problem is emblematic of both scales and contexts you mention in your question. On one hand, it suggests the stupidity of nation state border-envelopes, administrative boundaries that truncate the fluidity of ecological and social flows. In this sense, this border region is emblematic of a crisis that will redefine the world’s cartography in the next decades: the emerging conflicts across shifting geopolitical boundaries, natural resources and communities, the politics of water, the re-definition of density and the meaning of citizenship everywhere. On the other hand, this region becomes also the instrument to re-think national policies in the context of immigration, labor and surveillance in the US. The 11 million illegal immigrants that live in the US are an essential part of its economy, an issue that cannot continue to be ignored. So the triangulation between the politics of immigration and labor and the redefinition of the American neighborhood by immigrants will point the way to a more sustainable density made of mixed uses and micro economies. This will be one the most fundamental issues in re-thinking urbanization in many cities across the US in years to come.

ŞY: You wrote that your practice has been inspired by “powerlessness”. Is this powerlessness related to your role as an architect in the politics of space, the grand decisions made on policy levels?

TC: Yes. The sense of powerlessness I refer to has to do with the inability of the architecture profession to lead the way in rethinking systems and institutions of urban development in our time. We are absent from the debate, in shaping a political will to shape the city, its political economy. It really has to do with our absence from the politics and economic of development. During the last years of unprecedented deployment of neo-liberalist economic recipes of privatization, homogenization and control everywhere, architects have remained powerless, subordinated to the visionless environments defined by the bottom-line urbanism of the developer’s spreadsheet, making architecture simply a way of camouflaging corporate economic and political power, unconditionally. So, I can say, yes, this whole period of crisis represents an inspiration to imagining counter spatial procedures, political and economic structures that can produce new modes of sociability and encounter. Without altering the backward exclusionary policies that have been constructing the territory in the last years – the socio-political ground, our work will continue being a mere decoration of a selfish, oil hungry urbanization from China to Dubai, to New York.

ŞY: I know that you are closely interested in the feeling of “dissatisfaction” which you hope will move architects, but how can these concepts of “advocacy”, “participation”, “informality” be saved from the normalization and being romanticized in the circles of architectural elites? What would your agency be at this point?

TC: At some point we cannot be afraid of romanticizing these issues. It is a risk worth taking. We seem to endlessly move through a historical pendulum of actions and reactions, an ideological carrousel that keep us from constructing models of possibility. I am less interested on the image of the informal, I want to reveal its socio economic procedures, translate them into new modes of intervention into the formal city. I am interested in small gestures, on improving ways of living at the local level, closing the gap between social responsibility and artistic experimentation, spatial practices that can be sustainable in the long term out of temporal socio-cultural exchanges. All of this desire amounts to a redefinition of the architect-citizen, less defined by a professional identity, and more by the willingness to construct a course of action, a way of thinking, a new interface with a public culture. That is simply what participating means to me. Let’s not get confused about its contradictions. This is simply a time to ACT, to construct new agency, expanded models of urban pedagogy and practice.

ŞY: In the exhibition you tackle issues such as Pentagon’s new concept of non-integrating Gap & Functioning Core and the politics of multi-national outsourcing, what skills does the architect require reading this information and translating it into spatial strategies?

TC: Recently, I have been recollecting a passage I read in the New York Times a couple of years ago. It somehow has become the most inspirational statement I have read in questioning my role as an architect, the skills we are trained to enact as professional designers. This inspirational quote came from the least expected place: the first report to the US congress by General Petraeus, the chief US general in charge, in those days, of the war strategy in Irak. In this report Petraeus suggested to congress that after the experience in Irak, the contemporary US soldier should transform. Not anymore a high tech robot like figure armed with the latest gadgets that can dominate the Warfield from a distance. The contemporary soldier should instead engage the critical proximity of neighborhoods, transforming into an anthropologist, a social worker and versed in many languages! Now, even though this can sound scary, I thought, if the contemporary soldier is transforming why can’t we as architects… we need to appropriate the procedures of the other… not becoming necessarily anthropologists or social workers… but borrowing their procedures so as to operate differently in constructing critical observational research and alternative spatial strategies… In my mind, this is the most fundamental meaning of inter-disciplinarity: not only to share our points of view from the sanctity of our specializations, across the round table of discussion, as we usually do, but to actually contaminate each other with the alternative procedures of each other. In my case, at the border, is has been important to re-observe the actual hidden dynamics of socio-economic and political vectors embedded invisibly in the territory, learning from the actual conditions that have shaped the oddity of these sites of conflict. We need to challenge our reductive and limited ways of working, by which we continue seeing the world as a tabula rasa, on which to install the autonomy of architecture… we need to reorient our gaze towards the drama of such reality. This new realities, as Roemer Van Toorn told me, demand a new theory, a new practice.

ŞY: Do you think what you call “second hand urbanism” or “recycling” can yield to a new solution for housing shortage?

TC: The main lessons behind some of the invisible flows of traffic across the border (despite the apocalyptic implications of a more fortified border with intensified surveillance infrastructure), whether peoples, goods or services, is the new opportunities they yield for constructing alternative modes of encounter, dialogue, and debate, sharing resources and infrastructure and suggesting how the recycling of the fragments and situations of these two cities can allow new ways of conceptualizing housing and density. We have been documenting these illegal flows, physically manifested, in one direction, by the informal land use patterns and economies produced by migrant workers flowing from Tijuana and into San Diego, searching for the strong economy of Southern California, and by ‘infrastructural waste’ moving in the opposite direction to construct an insurgent, cross-border urbanism of emergency. This suggests that in the very act of recycling the urban debris of the ‘other’ city, Tijuana is constructing a second hand housing urbanism made of waste, whose foundation is not based on objects but on a process of threading topography, human and economic resources, social networks and programs, the political economy of waste and housing. Behind the façade of poverty there is a more compelling idea of housing as it not only treated as units of dwelling thrown in the territory, but conceived as a relational system grounded of social organization. A new paradigm can emerge here about sustainability, threading environmental, economic an social issues, and where housing becomes the main armature to construct public culture and infrastructure.

ŞY: Your input as the structural framework for the houses is also an acknowledgment of the architect for a practice without architects, which I believe is quite important. What is your stance in this acknowledgement, of what has been called “informality”?

TC: So far, I think, we continue to be seduced with the ‘image’ of the informal, as I mentioned before, and we are not translating its actual operative procedures. While I am interested in the emergent urban configurations produced out of social emergency, and the performatic role of individuals constructing their own spaces, I am also, primarily, interested in taking these patterns into other levels of functional translation. So, in this sense I am interested in pushing to other levels of meaning, let’s say, the work of someone like Christopher Alexander… believing that his theories were hijacked by a reductive stylistic sense of regionalism, and a folkloric idea of the vernacular… it became a style, rather than a system to re-organize the political economy of building.
In my mind, the informal vernacular -in the public’s imagination- continues to be reduced into a folkloristic image of either Italian hill towns or picturesque third world villages, the perennial idea of regionalism that has become stylized and static. Instead of a fixed image, I see the vernacular as a functional set of urban operations that allow the transgression of imposed political boundaries and top down economic models. I see the vernacular not as a noun but as a verb, which detonates traditional notions of site specificity and contex into a more complex system of hidden socio-economic exchanges. I see the vernacular as the urban unwanted, that which is left over after the pristine presence of architecture with capital ‘A’ has been usurped and transformed into the tenuous scaffold for social encounter.
In this context, more than architectural form, designers can also design forms of socio-economic exchange, the conditions that might ‘frame’ the vernacular as opposed to ‘construct’ it. For me, the main cues from the vernacular in this case emerge from an acknowledgement of the invisibility of informal socio-economic procedures at play in many neighborhoods in the contemporary city, or in shantytowns. Here, the informal is more than a mere collection of romanticized bricollaged structures surrounded by street vendors. It is a new politics and economics of development. Again, it is important that we see beyond the ‘image’ of the informal… in order to reveal what is beneath it: the compelling socio-economic procedures that can shape a REAL new urbanism, one made of urban tactics of alteration and retrofit, instead of the now ubiquitous, developer-driven, pseudo-vernacular, FAKE facades of difference.

ŞY: Related to the question above, how important do you think it is to incorporate more the design of infrastructure into the practice of architecture? (Regarding your contribution to the houses in Tijuana Border)

TC: More than any other time in history, our idea of infrastructure must transform. We need to understand infrastructure beyond bridges and highways… we need to imagine a variety of scales and registers of infrastructure… allowing, facilitating, managing change, the mutation of the contemporary city. In this context, I believe that a new understanding of housing and density must be produced by which housing and density is seen less as an amount of per acre in an undifferentiated territory and more as an amount of social exchanges per acre within a very specific community… housing as an infrastructure towards a public culture.

ŞY: Finally, do you also study, other cases in the world, where recycled urbanism (Soweto for example) or border politics (Israeli wall) shape the organization and growth of the cities? If yes, what are the parallels that you see among these different geo-political cases?

TC: At some point it was important to connect these observations emerging from the radicalization of my own locality: the Tijuana-San Diego border across a world atlas and contact other critical border zones where similar conditions of socio-economic emergency and strategies of surveillance and control collided. This is what I called The Politica Equator, which joined the borders imposed on Tijuana, Melilla and Palestine… constructing a trans continental corridor of conflict between the 28 and 32 degrees North Parallel. While the physical conditions might vary across these environments… the conditions remain the same: Worlds divided between enclaves of economic power and military might and sectors of poverty and precariousness, between sites of overabundance and scarcity, between the wanted and the unwanted. One thing I am sure of: at this moment when the economic power of the privileged sites of development has collapsed, it is time to suggest that it is in sites of scarcity –not of abundance- where the new urban paradigms will emerge, to construct new ideas about infrastructure, housing and density.

This interview was published in Arredamento Magazine November 09 issue.

Interview with Pelin Tan, Anh-Linh and me on Arch+

2009-10-27T21:07:00.004+02:00

http://www.arkitera.com/h46559-istanbulu-romantize-etmeden-tartismak.html

This interview was originally published in October 2009 issue of Betonart Magazine.

Editorial Text of Arch+

2009-10-26T21:37:00.001+02:00

Our editorial text for the upcoming issue of Arch+ Istanbul. (in German, Turkish will be available soon)

http://www.archplus.net/archiv_artikel.php?show=3159

November 3rd for our Arch+ Istanbul Issue

2009-10-12T19:48:00.004+03:00

If you are in and around Istanbul, come by to join us.

Interview with Konstantin Grcic

2009-10-11T03:21:00.003+03:00

Still Bringing Back from the Past:

Interview with Industrial designer Konstantin Grcic.

An Interview with Alberto Campo Baeza -(only in Turkish) back in 2005

2009-09-11T05:04:00.002+03:00

Alberto Campo Baeza ile yapılan bu söyleşi Betonart Dergisi'nin Ekim Sayısı'ndan (8. Sayı) alınmıştır. Mimarın Caja Granada ve De Blas Evi ile ilgili detaylı proje bilgisi ve diğer söyleşileri Betonart Dergisi'nin bu sayısında okuyabilirsiniz.

Şevin Yıldız: Öncelikle bize “Light Is More” sergisinin kariyerinizdeki öneminden bahsedebilir misiniz?

Alberto Campo Baeza: Her şeyden önce “teşekkür ederim” demek istiyorum. Bu sergi ilk olarak küratörüm Manuel Blanco’nun katkısıyla Chicago’da bulunan ve Mies van der Rohe tarafından tasarlanmış olan IIT Merkezi’nde açıldı. Sergi şu an, Aya İrini’de bulunan sergiyle aynı içeriğe sahipti ama ölçeği biraz daha küçüktü. Bu mekan böyle bir sergi için hiç de fena bir yer değildi ve ben çok mutluydum. Chicago’dan sonra daha iyi bir yer bulmak kolay olmadı. Sonraki durak New York’ta 5. Cadde üzerinde bulunan Urban Center’dı. Açılışına Kenneth Frampton, Richard Meier gibi isimlerin katıldığı bu sergi de oldukça iyiydi. Tam da bundan daha iyi bir yer bulmanın zor olacağını düşünürken Venedik’te Palladio tarafından yapılan Bazilika’da “Light is More”u gerçekleştirme imkanı bulduk. Siz de bilirsiniz ki Palladio ve Bazilikası mimarlar için çok özeldir. Bazilika’dan daha iyi ne olabilirdi ki? Daha iyi bir yer var mıydı? Aya İrini’nin bu kadar güzel, bu kadar büyüleyici olabileceği aklımın ucundan bile geçmemişti. Burası bir başyapıt, muhteşem bir baş yapıt. Hem mekansal olarak çok güzel, hem tarihi bellek olarak. Burada iliklerinize kadar mimarlığı hissedebiliyorsunuz. O nedenle söyleyebileceğim tek şey “teşekkür ederim”. Gerçekten çok etkilendim.

ŞY: Biz de size teşekkür ederiz. Mimari çalışmalarınızda, mimarlıkta tektonik kavramının farklı yönlerini sorguladığınız gözlemlenebilir. La Vinã’daki sosyal konut projesinde, piano nobile ve podyum kavramı ile ilgili düşünceleriniz okunabiliyor, Coruna’daki belediye binasında dikmeler üzerinde zeminden bir kopuş, De Blas Evi’nde ise peyzaja yerleşerek bir seyir noktası yaratma arzusu var. Zeminle kurduğunuz bu farklı ilişkiler için neler söyleyebilirsiniz.

ACB: Bu bir taraftan çok basit, diğer taraftan da oldukça karmaşık bir durum. Ben hep mimaride tektonikten bahsederim. Bunun için de Kenneth Frampton’ın Mimarlıkta Tektonik adlı eserinde öne sürdüğü teorilerden de sıkça yararlanırım. Bu kitapta Frampton tektonik ve steorotomik arasındaki temel farka değinir. Stereotomik zemin ve toprakla ilişkili olan ağır bir mimarlığı temsil ederken, tektonik zemin üstündekidir. Özetle bunlar “mağara ve kulübe”dir. Karayip’teki şu kulübe örneğini hatırlarsınız.Bence bu, mimarlar için oldukça yararlı bir örnektir. Ben bundan bahsettiğimde, mimarlığa empoze edilen bir şeyden bahsetmiyorum, bu sorunun temelinde, merkezinde düşünceler durmaktadır. Yazılarımın toplandığı bir kitabım var, tüm bunları özetlemek için adını İnşa Edilmiş Düşünce olarak koydum. Bence biz mimarlar, sadece form değil, düşünce de inşa ediyoruz. Arkitektonik ve stereotomik hakkında konuşurken sadece bu konuda konuşmayı sevdiğim için veya konuşmuş olmak için konuşmuyorum. Bu konunun bir mimar olarak benim için çok yararlı olduğunu düşündüğüm için konuşuyorum. Bana “serbest plan (horizantal plan)”, zemin üzerinde devam eden platformla ile ilgili soru sorduğunuzda, aklıma Mies van der Rohe’nin Farnsworth Evi geldi. Farnsworth Evi yüzen bir plandır. Çok yüksek olmayan bir serbest plan örneğidir. Farnsworth Evi’ni ilk ziyaret ettiğimde çok etkilenmiştim. Etkilenmemin sebebi Farnsworth Evi’nin zarif veya hoş olması değil. Ben bu tip sözcükleri sevmiyorum. Mimarlığın cevap vermesi gereken daha derin bir sorun, insanın peyzajla olan ilişkisi, yere olan konumudur. Çok basit bir mesele bu, toprağın üzerinde veya altında olmak gibi. Mies 1950’lerde Amerika’da Farnsworth Evi’ni yapmadan önce, 1929’da Tugendhat Evi’ni yapmıştır. Tugendhat Evi zarif bir yapı değildir, çünkü 6mx3m boyutlarında devasa bir cam kutudan oluşur. Ama Tugendhat Evi’nin en önemli yanı, Mies’in bir tepe üzerinde taş bir platform oluşturmuş olmasıdır. Ben de hem De Blas Evi’nde hem de şu an New York’ta yaptığım diğer evde aynı düşünceyi belki biraz farklı formlarla gerçekleştiriyorum, Mies’inkinden daha saf formlarla. Bu söylediğim nedeniyle ukala olduğum düşünülebilir, ama tam aksine ben Mies’i düzeltmiyorum, ondan öğreniyorum. Mies’den öğrenmenin yolu da onu taklit etmek değil, ondan ilham almaktır. Mies’in podyumu veya platformu kullanma biçimi Schinkel’in platformu kullanma biçimiyle aynıdır. Mesela Eski Yunan’da mimarların yaptığı büyük podyumlara hayranımdır. Akropolis bunun iyi bir örneğidir. Akropolis bir dağ değildir, dağdan öte bir şeydir. Dünyaya hükmedecek bir platform yaratan, oyulmuş bir dağdır.

ŞY: Peki bu söylediklerinizi göz önünde bulundurarak, zeminle kurulan ilişki dünya ile kurulmuş bir iktidar ilişkisidir diyebilir miyiz?

ACB: Tabii diyebiliriz. Bu bir empoze etme biçimidir, ama iyi bir empoze etme biçimi. Mimarlık gizlenemez, doğayla kamufle edilmez.

ŞY: Aslında benim de bu konuyla ilgili bir sorum olacaktı. Yapılarınız her zaman mimari kimliklerini öne çıkaran, inşa edilmiş olduklarını ve strüktürlerini vurgulayan bir duruşa sahipler. Herhangi bir şekilde doğal çevreyle ilişkilenmek gibi bir kaygıları yok. Onun dışında duruyorlar, tektonik bir biçimde, mimari varlıklarını temsil ediyorlar. Bu anlamda bence sizin düşüncelerinizin ve yapılı çevreye olan yaklaşımınızın temsilcisi gibiler.

ACB: Çok haklısınız. Kullandığınız diğer bir anahtar kelime de “strüktür” ya da “çerçeve”. Strüktür binanın iskeletidir. Ben strüktürü düşünmeden form tasarlayan mimarlara karşıyım. Örneğin Kenneth Frampton’la Bilbao’daki Guggenheim Müzesi’ni ziyaret etmiştik. Bu binanın formu çok güzel, hayranlık uyandırıyor. Varolan en güzel formlardan biri ama sonuçta sadece form. Mimariden çok heykel gibi. Gehry burada iki kabuk kullanmış. İç kabuk ve dış kabuk arasına ise strüktür yerleştirilmiş. Aynen ortopedik bir protez gibi. Tıpta da ortopedik uygulamalarda vücuda eklenen her parça, yapay bir parçadır. Tamam, aynı görünür ama doğal değildir, sonradan oraya destek olması için yerleştirilmiş bir ektir. İlk önce formu yaratıp daha sonra statik mühendisini çağırıp buna uygun bir strüktür tasarla, yapıyı destekle diyemezsiniz. Üniversitedeyken harika bir hocam vardı. Bir ustaydı. Strüktürle ilgili bu çelişkiyi çok güzel bir hikayeyle örneklerdi. Bir kadın doğum yapıp çocuğunu kucağına aldığında “Aman tanrım iskeleti unutmuşum, hemen şimdi bebeği açıp içine iskeleti yerleştirmeliyiz,” diyemez. Bebeğin ilk oluştuğu andan itibaren, iskelet oradadır.

ŞY: Kenneth Frampton sizinle ilgili yazdığı yazısında, ilk dönem projelerinizde çokça bulunan ve dünyayı dışarıda bırakma prensibine dayanan avlu anlayışınızdan, en az onun kadar zorlayıcı olan, yapıyı, ufku izlemek için uygun bir seyir noktasına dönüştürme kaygısına geçiş yaptığınızı belirtiyor. Frampton’ın bu tespitine katılıyor musunuz ve mimarlığınızın peyzaja karşı duruşundaki bu değişikliği nasıl açıklayabilirsiniz?

ACB: Kenneth Frampton’a katılıyorum. Bence o bir usta ve mimarlık eleştirisi alanındaki en önemli isim. Büyük bir cömertlik gösterip benim hakkımda yazdığı metinden bir alıntı yapmışsınız. Frampton burada nasıl değiştiğimi anlatıyor. Ama ben sadece değişmiş olmak için değişmiyorum. Her peyzaj, her yer ve her yapı birbirinden farklı koşullara sahiptir. Ben Bir Campo Baeza etiketi yaratma kaygısıyla her yapımı aynı şekilde tasarlayamam. Bir dönem bazı meslektaşlarım benim her binamın beyaz olduğunu söylüyorlardı, çünkü en çok yayınlanan ve göz önüne çıkan Gaspar Evi, Ascencio Evi gibi binalarım beyazdı. Ama DB Evi devasa bir beton podyum, şu an New York’ta yapmakta olduğum ev de betonarme. Almeira’da yaptığım ofis binasında ise taş kullandım. Sıklıkla taş ve traverten de kullanırım. Bence yaratıcı işlerle uğraşan birinin, bir etiket veya imaj oluşturmaya çalışması oldukça saçma. Peyzajı anlamalısınız, oranları anlamalısınız. Etiket sahibi olmak istemediğimden değişiyorum diyebilirim. Mesela bugünlerde eğrisel yüzeyler çok kullanılıyor diye eğrisel yüzeyler kullanmam. Ama kullanacağım durumlar da vardır. Mercedes Benz projesinde tamamen eğrisel bir rampa vardı. Siz Campo Baeza’nın kare planlı bir rampa yapmaya çalıştığını veya sıklıkla beyaz renk kullandığı için üzerinde otomobillerin hareket edeceği bir rampayı beyaz renkli yapabileceğini düşünebiliyor musunuz? Bu tamamen saçmalık olur. Ama öte taraftan bugünlerde yaptığım bir müze projesinde de yayalar için beyaz bir rampa yaptım, çünkü üzerinde otomobiller değil insanlar hareket edecek. İşte bu tip meseleler değişimin arkasındaki gerçek sebeplerdir. Yani sorunuza geri dönecek olursak, Frampton dedi diye değil (gülüyor), her proje yeni bir problem olduğu için değişiyorum. Her yeni bina, yeni bir problem, yeni bir sorudur. Bu nedenle önceden verilmiş bir cevabım yok.

ŞY: Yani aslında peyzaja karşı duruşunuz değiştiği için değil, her bir arazi ve proje farklı olduğu için değişiyorsunuz. Peki şöyle bir soru sormak istiyorum; yazılarınızda yere sağlam basan zemin - geçici gökyüzü ikiliğinden bahsediyorsunuz. Kent siluetinin ufkun inşa edilmiş bir parçası olduğunu düşünürsek, sizin binalarınızın kent siluetiyle ilişkisi nasıl oluşuyor veya yapılarınızla şehre karşı nasıl bir duruş alıyorsunuz?

ACB: Bence sorunuz çok zekice. Şehirde bir şey inşa ettiğim zaman, kent siluetine bir müdahalede bulunuyorum. Ama bu, sadece büyük ölçekte binalar yapabildiğimde mümkün. Örneğin bu anlamda Granada projesiyle gurur duyuyorum. Granada projesi sadece iç mekan ve ışığın etkili kullanımından ibaret değil. Aynı zamanda bu binayla, Granada’nın silueti de değişti. İlginç olan nokta şu; benim yaptığım yapı, çevresindeki yapılardan daha büyük değil, ama önde ve arkada bulunan iki bahçesi yüzünden, çevresinden yalıtılmış gibi görünüyor. Bu yapı kendini bir podyum üstünde yükseltip, çevresindeki korkunç yapılardan yalıtmayı başarmış bir küp. Bu küp diğer binalardan daha yüksek değil ve imar kurallarına tamı tamına uyuyor ama tüm şehrin siluetine baktığınızda diğerlerinden daha yüksekmiş gibi görünüyor. Aslında İstanbul da bu açıdan iyi bir örnek. Bir terastan tarihi yarımadaya baktığımda, Sultanahmet Cami, Ayasofya ve Aya İrini’yi görüp siluetin içinden ayırt edebiliyorum. Aldo Rossi ‘de “Şehrin Mimarisi” adlı eserinde anıtlardan bahseder. Anıtlar akılcı bir yerleşim düzeninde öne çıkabilen referans noktalarıdır. Roma, New York ve İstanbul gibi büyük şehirler referans noktalarına sahiptirler. Her büyük şehir akıllı bir yerleşim düzenine sahip olamayabilir. Örneğin Sao Paulo da çok büyük bir şehirdir ama aynı zamanda felaket bir şehirdir çünkü doğru düzenlenmemiştir. Burada düzenden kastettiğim çerçeve ve strüktür değil, referans noktası yaratma biçimidir.

ŞY: İstanbul’un bütününde akılcı bir planı olduğunu söyleyebilir misiniz, yoksa bu sadece tarihi yarımada için mi geçerli?

ACB: Hayır, sadece tarihi yarımada için. (gülüyor) Biliyorum, biliyorum..Ben sadece pozitif olmaya çalışıyordum. İstanbul’dayım, İstanbul’a aşık oldum, o nedenle olumlu konuşmak istiyorum.

ŞY: Bu sizin İstanbul’a ilk gelişiniz mi?

ACB: Evet ama son olmadığı kesin. Ortadan yok olmak için tekrar gelmeliyim. Madrid’de hem yaşıyor, hem çalışıyor hem de ders veriyorum. New York’ta yaptığım bu ev projesi nedeniyle her 2-3 ayda bir, bir haftalığına New York’a gidiyorum. Bu bir haftayı çok seviyorum, sadece projenin üzerinde çalışma imkanı bulduğum için değil, aynı zamanda yazabilmek, düşünebilmek için zaman bulduğum için. Bu nedenle de İstanbul, New York, Roma üçgeninin, benim için çok iyi bir üçgen olduğunu düşünüyorum.

ŞY: Hala serbest planın (horizantal plan) mekanın özü olduğunu düşünüyor musunuz? Tasarımda giderek daha çok kullanılan, çeşitli şekillerde zemini deneysel bir şekilde kullanan dijital teknolojiler hakkında ne düşünüyorsunuz? Bu çalışmalar sizin mimarlık okumanızda nerede duruyor?

ACB: Sorunuzda eski öğrencim ve Yokohama Terminali’nin mimarlarından biri olan Alejandro Zaero Polo ile ilgili bir koku alıyorum (gülüyor). Alejandro muhteşem bir insandır, çok zekidir. Yokohama yarışmasını kazandığında, birçok arkadaşım bana Yokohama Terminali ile ilgili ne düşündüğümü sordu. Ben de projenin muhteşem bir ustalık ürünü olduğunu söyledim. Çok zekice tasarlanmış bir proje. Hareket halindeki su ve sakin kara arasında bir mimarlık ürünü. Tam bir geçiş alanı. Sessiz, sakin kalınacak bir mekan değil. Sessiz karadan, hareketli denize geçiş yapılacak bir pasaj. Bu anlamda bence bir başyapıt. Ama bazı mimarlar bu zemin anlayışını bir konutta uyguladığında -burada özel olarak kimseyi kastetmiyorum- bunu aptalca buluyorum. Frank Llyod Wright bu konuda iyi bir örnek olabilir. Wright, Şelale Evi projesinde birbiri üzerinde kayan serbest planlar üretti. Bu mekanlar oldukça büyük mekanlardı. Wright’ı örnek alan birçok mimar, bu kayan katlar prensibini daha küçük mekanlar için kullandı. Bu da akıllıca bir çözüm olmadı. O nedenle zeminin nerede serbest plan olması veya nerede dinamik olması gerektiği konusunda yargılarım yok.

ŞY: O zaman siz bunu bir işlev meselesi olarak görüyorsunuz?

ACB: Hayır. Bu sadece işlevsel bir problem değil, ama aynı zamanda işlevsel bir problem. Ben serbest planı savunurken, tasarımcıyı daha özgür bıraktığı için savunuyorum. Sadece daha fazla işleve izin vermiyor, aynı zamanda daha fazla özgürlük tanıyor. Daha kıvrımlı ve dairesel formalar daha spesifik olduklarından, pek fazla özgürlük tanımaz. Serbest plan ise Hintliler’in geleneksel giysisi sari gibidir. Herkesin bedenine uyabilecek esnekliktedir.

ŞY: Çağdaş İspanyol mimarları arasında da –Carme Pinos, Carlos Ferrater, Beth Gali gibi– zemini yeniden tanımlama, yeniden yaratma, geleneksel plan formlarının dışında arayışlar içinde olan birçok mimar var. İspanya’daki birçok kent de artık kentsel peyzajıyla örnek gösteriliyor.

ACB: Evet bence bu saydığınız mimarlar da benim gibiler. Hepsini tanıyorum, o nedenle biliyorum. Mallorca’daki binamda 24 tane portakal ağacı kullanarak temel çerçeveyi oluşturmuştum. Almeria’daki katedral meydanını düzenlediğimde de 24 tane palmiye ağacı kullandım. Palmiye ağacı kullanmam skandal olmuştu. Oysa bana göre katedralin sütunları da taş palmiye ağaçları gibiler. Meydan projesi bana ilk geldiğinde, ben de dedim ki “Tamam katedraldeki mantığın aynısını burada kullanalım, ama farklı bir malzemeyle. Taş yerine gerçek ağaçlar kullanın. O nedenle her bir projede çevre peyzajını anlamak önemlidir.

ŞY: Yazılarınızdan ve verdiğiniz referanslardan anladığım kadarıyla, mimarlık tarihine karşı bir ilginiz var. Mimarlıkla ilgili yazılarınızdan birinde Gotik mimarlığın daha çok gün ışığı almak için yükseldiğini belirtmiştiniz. Gotik mimaride ölçeğin çok büyük olmasının sebeplerinden biri de bir karşı karşıya kalma durumu yaratmaktır; ilahi güç ve insan arasında. Siz de Caja Granada projesinde böyle tanrısal bir ölçek kullandınız. Bunun sebebi neydi? İnsan ve yapılı çevre arasında bir karşı karşıya kalma durumu yaratmak mı, ışığı daha derinlikli olarak içeri alabilmek mi ya da mimarlığınızda altını çizdiğiniz yerçekimi ve boşluk kavramlarını daha fazla hissettirmek mi?

ACB: Sorunuz çok akıllıca ve burada siz seçeneklerin üçünü vurguladınız. Sanırım hepsi mümkün. Ben ışığı binaya taşıdığımda, iç mekan, gökyüzü ve tanrıyla bir karşılaşma elde etmeye çalışıyorum. Tabii ki bunun mitolojik bir boyutu var çünkü ışığın dahil olmasıyla beraber, siz Helios, yani eski Yunan’da bir Tanrı olan güneş, ile diyalog içerisine giriyorsunuz. Güneş de sürekli hareket halinde. Bir keresinde Caja Granada binasında bir gazeteciyle röportaj yapıyordum ve o sırada ikimiz de güneşin değişen ışığını hayretle izleme şansını bulmuştuk. İçerideki sütunlar da dairesel kesitli olduğundan, bu hareketi çok net olarak görebiliyorduk. Bu değişimi izlemek, aslında bence Tanrı’yla karşı karşıya gelmektir. Olayın işlevsel boyutuna gelirsek de, bu ışık mermerin bir çeşidi olan su mermerinden yapılmış panellerden içeri giriyor. Burada bu malzeme, beyaz renginden dolayı ışığı yansıtıp içerideki ofis mekanlarına daha fazla ışık sağladığı için seçildi. Aslında tepe ışıklıkları için benim gerçekleştirilemeyen bir fikrim vardı. Ben o açıklıkları, Pantheon’daki gibi açık istiyordum. Tamamen açık, güneşin, yağmurun ve kuşların girebileceği gibi. Işıklıkları camsız kullanmayı tercih etmiştim ama işveren bunu istemedi. Bu yüzden de cam kullandım. Örneğin Patnheon gibi Ayasofya da beni büyüleyen bir binadır. Ders verdiğimde çoğu zaman öğrencilerime Ayasofya’yı anlatırım. Bu İstanbul’a ilk gelişim olduğu ve daha önce Ayasofya’yı sadece fotoğraflarından gördüğüm için, çok hayal kırıklığına uğradım, çünkü yapının tepe açıklıkları yarı saydam bir malzeme ile kapatılmıştı. Işık fotoğraflarda gördüğüm gibi içeri girmiyordu. Kim bilir belki ileride benim işverenlerim de Caja Granada’nın ışıklıklarını yarı saydam bir malzemeyle kapatırlar. Mermer, bronz gibi malzemeler çok güzel malzemeler, ama çok pahalılar. Peki dünya üzerindeki en sıra dışı malzeme ne? Gün ışığı. Hem sıra dışı, hem de bedava. Belki de bedava olduğu için mimarlar tarafından dikkate alınmıyor.

ŞY: Tercih ettiğiniz malzemeler var mı? Yazılarınızda bazı malzemeleri geçici, kalıcı gibi adlandırmışsınız. Örneğin taş kalıcı, ahşap geçici gibi. Peki bu ayrımlar sizin için gerçekten bu kadar sabit mi yoksa yeni teknolojilerle malzemelere yeni özellikler kazandırılabileceğine inanıyor musunuz?

ACB: Hayır, bu da duruma göre değişen bir şey. Bu konuda da verecek sabit ve tek bir cevabım yok. Mallorca’daki bahçeyi yaptığımda, çelik kullanmıştım ama belki bir gün çelik yok olacak ve geriye bahçe duvarları kalacak. Örneğin en son yaptığım ofis binasında paslanmaz çelik kullandım. Bu çok olağan bir malzeme değil. Paslanmaz çelik tercihi, ne çok ucuz ne de çok pahalı olan bir çözümdü. Hangi malzemeyi kullanabileceğimizi düşünürken, aklıma endüstriyel bir paneli kullanmak geldi. Ama olduğu gibi değil de biraz değiştirerek kullanmak. Böylece panelin ilk yüzeyini değiştirip, paslanmaz çelik kullandım. Başarılı bir çözüm oldu. Yeni teknolojileri de yararlı olduğu ölçüde kullanmayı seviyorum.

ŞY: Bize zaman ayırdığınız için çok teşekkür ederiz.

ACB: Ben de teşekkür ederim

Arch+ Guest Editorial for October Issue

2009-07-20T15:07:00.004+03:00

The cover of 185th Issue

Issue on Istanbul is going to be released in October.
I will be the guest editor with Pelin Tan.

More to come..

Interview I did with Hilde Heynen in 2007 for Istanbul Art Biennale

2008-11-10T05:50:00.004+02:00

The following interview was done with architectural critic and theorist Hilde Heynen for the studyoKahem publication in Istanbul Biennale in 2007.

Starting with the politics, do you think there is a political axis to architecture today, like there was for the modernist architects? If yes, how would you try to describe this?

I do think politics is not irrelevant to architecture. The link between architecture and politics is rarely direct, but one cannot deny that the link exists. On a first level, the social and political context in which one works does matter. Are one’s jobs only for the elite? Do they yes or no contribute to a better public space for all? Are they supportive of an oppressive regime, or do they enhance and empower kernels of resistance? On a second level, the architectural form – the language – can contain implicit or explicit references which entail the building with a meaning that goes beyond its immediate use. Also on this level political resonances can and do come in. So yes, general as this answer is, I do believe that architecture has a political layer.

In the concluding remarks of your article “CODA:Engaging Modernism” you say, “We do not share any longer the optimism of the early modernists who thought that new would automatically mean better. We rather belong to those who believe that, back from utopia, we nevertheless have to continue the struggle that initiated the desire for it.” Can you say that this optimism of early modernists is necessary for initiating a better future? Do you find it possible or impossible?

There are those (like my friend Lieven De Cauter) who would rather hold that pessimism is necessary, because only pessimists can really grasp the disastrous nature of reality-as-it-is-now. In that reasoning, it takes pessimism to be really serious about things and to start wanting them to change. I do not completely agree with De Cauter, for his pessimism often takes him to see things even worse than they are. Nevertheless I do agree that the ‘easy’ optimism of the modernists is not viable anymore. Nobody today can honestly expect that democracy, modernization and liberation will come about quasi-automatically. Nobody can expect it to be an easy trajectory. I do think therefore that it takes the right mixture of pessimism and optimism to go ahead – pessimism in order to see clearly, optimism in order to have the courage to do something about it.

Most people see the most enduring legacy of Modern Movement, is its social responsibility. How successful do you think local modern practices are, especially in public buildings, in achieving this kind of social equity and reach? ( considering the top to bottom nature of most of these local modernisms)

I do think that modernism had multiple faces too. In colonial contexts, modernism was indeed often top-down and imposed upon people who didn’t ask for it. Its heralded ‘social responsibility’ in these cases was often loaded with a paternalistic attitude that felt short really acknowledging differences. Nevertheless I still admire the modernists who built, with minimal budgets and resources, schools and health centers in the most remote of places. Unfortunately many of these practices have not been thoroughly documented. I am thinking for example of some of the buildings of Anthony Almeida in Tanzania. He was most proud of his buildings in the capital, and kept good documentation about these. But his contribution to the setting up of a fine meshed system of health centers might have been even more crucial in the daily life of many people. Unfortunately he did away with the sketches and drawings for these modest buildings.

Do you think sustaining the reflections of Modern Movement as a critical culture today, can bear optimism and desire at the same time?

I would certainly hope so. This is at least why I continue teaching about the Modern Movement: because I hope that it inspires, in one way or another, architects of today and tomorrow.

What do you think the role of “appropriation” is in striving exciting, always aspirational modernist projects? (The civic centers, public houses and all the public buildings that are designed – in their programs as well- to accommodate the needs of a greater public)

I am convinced that appropriation is absolutely necessary. If there is one thing really questionable about the Modern Movement, it was its belief in universal models. I am convinced that translation to a local context is always necessary, and that what works well in some places might be totally unfit for other places.

Do you think this biennale’s theme Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary:Optimism in the Age of Global War is a strong utopian model which can initiate “not yet”?

I can fully subscribe to the Biennale’s appeal for ‘a bottom-up, truly democratic project of modernization and modernity that is based on the respect of individual rights and humanist values’. I am very sympathetic also towards the choice for exploring Istanbul’s explosive urban expansion through the set-up of the Biennale. I do think that any vital projects for the future have to start in the reality of the present, being in this case the multiple and ‘chaotic’ urban reality of the city’s highly different neighborhoods and settlements.

You say that “After all, it is through utopian thinking that we train ourselves in imagining a better architecture that would correspond to an alternative and better world.” Do you think because of the way it was implemented, the legacy of Modern Movement is as equally responsible for creating status quos in local modernities (so-called third world), whereas it is supposed to be challenging them?

Yes, you might very well state that. It is probably true in a lot of cases. I think that by imposing modernization from above, it was often experienced as a static thing, and the buildings that represented this kind of modernization did not really carry the impetus for change once the regime changed. One should nevertheless not generalize this statement, since there are certainly also cases where this observation is clearly not true. I am thinking for example of a modernist market building in Dar es Salaam, that gave rise to the flourishing of an extremely vibrant commercial neighborhood around it.

From the biennale’s conceptual text;
“The Third World is now facing a contradiction; it has become both a crisis and challenge to arrive at a ‘renaissance’. The key question is whether the non-western world can still reinvent effective models of modernization to face the challenges of globalization which are driven by liberal capitalism and dominated by Western powers.”

Do you believe that effective models can still be reinvented?

Yes. I do believe that. History tells us that the gravitational centers of the world shift. Europe no longer has the impact or the power it exerted in the 19th century. The Soviet Union has lost a lot of its former power. America is loosing a lot of its political credibility, and is threatened in its status as the most important economy. Under these circumstances it seems only logical to expect that the new vitality will come from elsewhere – not from Europe or America, but from those places which were long seen as ‘periphery’. South-East Asia, India and China for example are coming up as new economic and political centers. They are re-inventing their own models of modernity. There still is a long way to go for these models to answer to the appeal for ‘bottom-up, really democratic’ modernities, but they are different from European or American ones. And it is worth struggling for to make them better and more emancipatory. Turkey, I think, can really play a key-role in these developments, because of its multiple legacies that link it to the East as well as to the West. Reinventing a model of modernity that respects and acknowledges the reality of religious traditions and everyday practices in Islam seems to me one of the points that necessitate reflection and action.

House: a settlement negotiation

2008-11-08T00:06:00.009+02:00

A late news maybe, but this was an exhibition we did with colleagues of mine (Hakan Tuzun, Mert Eyiler, Pelin Tan, Bogachan Dundaralp) in 2006 in Istanbul.

Our competition entry for Live the Box

2008-11-07T06:37:00.003+02:00

This summer I worked on a competition project with my colleague Mert Eyiler. The competition was a vision developed using shipping containers for an old industrial site in Newark.

on Giancarlo de Carlo with Pelin Tan

2008-10-23T17:31:00.004+03:00

New article on Giancarlo de Carlo with my art historian\curator friend Pelin Tan. It is published in the Fall issue of Betonart magazine.

Unfortunately it is in Turkish but this is what it looks like.

Interview with Dani Karavan -(2004)

2007-12-15T19:21:00.001+02:00

Sevin Yildiz: What is “nature” for you?

It is everything that exists on our globe. Everything that exists without interference of human kind. Which is not completely %100. I think nature for me is not urban situation. I think it is everything not urban. Nature for me is also “time”,land, the movement of the earth around the sun, the moon, the wind, the water, the light mostly, the landscape, the mountains, the valleys, the rivers, the sea

SY: What is “modern” for you?

Modern for me is much more difficult. I thought it would be easier. Modern is what people are trying to develop. I can not say that it did not exist before. It is something renewing the concepts and the view of people towards nature, towards the surrounding. It is a new kind of concept, to understand what exists, to perceive what exists, to use what exists in a new way. So this is for me modern. It can also have many other aspects. I want to focus on this aspect to narrow it. Anything that is created, opening new ways to see and to understand the surrounding and the nature. This is modern. And because of that modern will always exist. You can not say till now it is modern. This is modern and from now on it is not modern. Whenever people find new possibilities, new ways to see what exists and new ways to use what exists, that is modernity.

SY: What does “plain nature” and “plain concrete” mean to you ?

I think concrete is also nature. It is made of natural materials. Sand, gravels,cement- which comes also from nature and with water. This is the kind of creation of a humankind of kind of a stone in a way. We can say that concrete is composed of different kinds of stone of nature. This is a kind of creation by humankind. Concrete is a natural material, it is not artificial.
Then maybe regarding what you have told us before, you could also say that concrete is modern?
Yes thats what i would see as modernity. But we cannot say it is anymore modern because it has been used like for a century. But absolutely we can consider concrete as a form of modernity

SY: Why do you mostly prefer to use concrete?

I am coming from painting, i was a painter. I wanted to work with public spaces. Therefore i wanted to complete my studies in painting art. So i went to Florence to study Fresco. Then i discovered that Fresco is not application. It is not something for the wall. It is done on the wall. The same material of the construction of the building. The same sand, the same lime, the same color , purificated. Not rough..It is part of the construction.When I came back from Florence to Israel, I understood that Fresco can not be done without construction. It could not be done on concrete. It was a kind of a poison. It would kill the colors of the Fresco. This is not a chemical process for fresco. I though maybe I could do it in mosaic but i felt this would be always in application. With concrete you can not work on site. You have to prepare it somewhere else but you can also work on the site. I expereinced it in the Courthouse of Tel Aviv Project. Where I was casting all of the negatives. It was really a part of the construction. It was part of the building. In another experience I was casting the negative and applying it on to the wall that was there. Then I had a comission to do the courtyard of this courthouse. And I decided to make it from white concrete.It was the first time. Then from there on I had the comission for Negev monument. I could not do it with another material. This had to do with the surrounding where the monument was presented. The modernity of the Kibbutz Theme. Negev is a desert and also concrete contains a lot of sand which is part of the desert. With that I became very very attached to concrete. And I continued to work with concrete whenever I thought it was convenient.
For the White Square; Tel –Aviv is a city full of buildings with white concrete. Tel – Aviv is known all over the world as the white city, all the the International style and the Bauhaus buildings. White colour is very typical for this kind of architecture. In another comission in Japan, it was also very suitable because the park was covered in snow for 6 months. Because it is paralel to Siberia. I did not want to create something that would contradict but something that would go along with it. White concrete was also nice with water and grass. That was why i used it there. In another case, when i had to do this memorial for Walter Benjamin in Portbau,at the beginning the idea was to make it with white concrete.. The white cemetery, the white architecture in Spain, in Ibiza. Immediately i changed my mind. It would look like, part of the cemetery, part of the nouveaux riches, the new villas..But the site’s nature rejected it. The mountains had kind of a rusty stone. There was a lot of iron in it. Then i said “No, no dont do it. Try something else”. Then i decided on cordenne. It is something like form there. It fit very well with the color of the stones. The next huge project I am doing, also has some concrete. The islands had to be concrete but white did not fit again with nature. So I tried to do concrete like sand color, concrete like earth. I wanted to make a sand project, an earth project. Earth architecture maybe.. I cannot say that i succeeded %100. I can say I succeeded somehow. The material I am using is not because I have ideefixe, the material is always the result of the site. So I am not imposing, I hope, concrete on the site. I am using it when it is serene. It has to do with site, it has to do with memory, many many things that are composing my work.
24 m to 7 m high the wall in Jerusalem. You see it on the tv unfortunately very often because of whats happening in Israel. I was comissioned to do a concrete wall. I was a young architect. 24 years old. Today i am surprised where i got this courage to take this comission. The architects knew my work with concrete, the ones i did before in Israel but then i started to think that Jerusalem is not concrete. Jerusalem is stone. Altough I did not have many experiences with stone, I wanted to use stone. This is very important in explaining that my choice of material is not to impose material on the site. It is to integrate the material with the site.

SY: Where does the idea of “city” stand in your works?

I dont know. We are creatures that live in cities. I was born in a city. I was really growing up in a city. The arab cities in Israel, the International Style. I observed, I observed alot. Then Florence. I was lucky to grow up in a new city like Tel – Aviv and also lucky to be in old cities like :Jaffa, Jerusalem and Florence. It is kind of a promenade, city for me is kind of a promenade, my work is also a kind of promenade. My work is kind of a little citadel. Sometimes people think that my work is a village, but it is the result of my work. I did not work to make a village construction. I did it because i felt i should do it that way. I was commisioned and i wanted to answer to my comission.
SY: How do you structure the relationship between organic and inorganic?

In the Negev monument, it was supposed to continue the organic structures in nature. Then it changed to geometrical forms. Because i wanted the desert to get inside my work. It was kind of a passage from organic to unorganic forms. But the white square is different, it is part of the unorganic forms, it is part of the city and the town. Both the site and my work were not organic. In my opinion unorganic forms are organic as well because in nature you find many many elements, which look like unorganic but also organic because they are created by nature. So unorganic and organic creates a kind of tension. To be organic or inorganic, it depends on the project, why i am doing it, who is going to use it.

SY: What is your opinion on the current trend of memorial architecture? Some critics think that as we build more memorials, we fragment our memory more and the we remember less.

I think that they are right. And spatially all those monuments, which are made of artificial materials stand the same all the time. I am very tired about it. Especially in Israel there are so many monuments. I built my first monument, the Negev monument, in the desert. The second was for Holocaust. They were in a way using traditional materials. Then i thought i should try different things. I was asked to make a memorial in Kibbutz for people who died in different wars. It was a valley between mountains, a beautiful valley. It was surrounded by lots of different memories. So i proposed to make a little hill and plant cypress trees. It was discussed in Kibbutz. They decided to make an iron memorial which you see everywhere. Trees are there and they will always be there but in other types of memorials, they stay the same, they become part of your daily life, ordinary, and the memory disappears. For the holocaust memorial in Berlin, I proposed to make it from flowers. They asked me what would happen when these flowers die, and I said this is the beauty of the work. This is the concept. They will die, they will be covered by snow. Spring will come, they will blossom again. They will be green all together, new flowers will blossom. So each year it will remind itself with the flowers that come out of earth. It was an enormous surface, like 200m to 200 m. The flowers would remind of the yellow star of the murdered people. For the memorial that i am building for gypsies, there is a lake and in the middle of that there will be a flower that blossoms once in a while. The flower will change each day. It will always be a kind of ceremony, like a prayer.

SY: In my opinion Guernica by Picasso, is a turning point in the history of commomeration. What is your opinion on this?

Guernica is not a memorial but it carries memory. It is a very important product of last century. It carries historical memory of the war, cruelty of the war. Also has a political message. Art is not an esthetic form but also it raises cries against killing of the innocent. This is also important for me because I consider myself as a political artist. I try to do my best in my way, which is a different way, for peace. No by a figurative way but mostly by titles, mostly by text maybe by the atmosphere which my work is creating. But i do not think that art is saving the lives of people.

SY: You use very basic geometrical elements . And the striking aspects of these compositions are formed by the cuts, splits or holes within them. Would you say you are adding to your layers by subtracting?

It is really difficult to tell. I can not really say why I am doing this. It does not come from a concept. It comes mostly from feelings. The forms that I am using are provoking other forms. I can not tell you why i choose geometrical forms. If i know why I did something in my work or what does it mean to me, I would be very careful not to tell it. Because at the moment i tell you, I will close a door. People would not be able to see other things. And this is a big mistake if I am an artist working for public. Because my work is not only to look at it but also to go through, to climb, to create all possible senses. Probably we all have different experiences or associations in life. So why should I close the door, I would like to be more open to everybody to create their own experience. I hope I am giving the possibility to be creative to people not only to repeat. Sometimes people come and tell me something about my work that I have never thought about it. It sounds much richer. It is moving me, things that exist in my work which I did not know.

SY: You create very strong impressions by using different scales side by side. What does “scale” mean to you?

Scale is very important for me. It is important because first of all scale is to do with human. I am working with models. When I get a comission, I start to build models. I go to the site, I observe the site, I feel and measure the site at the studio we build different scales. Site model to see the surrounding, but always I am working with the human scale. It is a little man or woman in my models. All the scales in my model are the results of relations with the surrounding. To create a kind of a relation between the site and the humankind. It is very important for me. Measuring is also very important, measuring the site before we build to see if the size in the model is real. It is about the proportions and the people in the site.

SY: You are described as a master for public not for private entitities and your designs are inclusive in their uses, what is your opinion on public realm of today’s cities?
To create spaces for people and to be used by people, this is very important. People need places to meet because less and less people are meeting today. They have a kind of cultural relationship with the site. Sometimes we see these common spaces are decorated; the underground, the metro, the bus stations. And sometimes they are not so good. We call it furniture. Even if it doesnt look very nice, it is a positive thing. The most important thing in what i do in my works, is maintenance. It is very very difficult all over the world. It is not enough the construct it. Then to leave it without taking care by professional people. A work of art should not be cleaned only by cleaners. It needs restoring with special materials and products. Even the gardens are looked after well, you have a gardener that comes several times a week, to cut, to plant new plants, to water them. But sculptures are left for months without any maintenance. Nobody comes to take care. This is a big mistake. And if it is like that, better not to do it. Like this, a cultural event becomes an anti-cultural event. I am suffering from that very much.

SY: If you were commisioned to design a landmark or a composition for the most striking phenomenon or issue of 21st. Century (so far), what would it be about?
I never have ideas in mind and look for sites. My works are coming from the sites, from the comissions. I will look whatis requested in the comission and then look at the site to see if it is possible to do such a thing there.

Interview with Paulo Mendes da Rocha

2007-12-06T06:23:00.000+02:00

Sevin Yildiz: How is the relation with the other offices and how do you manage to work with other teams in different projects? Depending on the program you have four different offices to collaborate. How does that choice happen?

PMR- I didn’t do a plan to work like this. Step by step things happened in order to develop the work on this way. And also, more than working with ex-students, etc, in this case I must contract them as a company. And whenever I have a commission I propose to them to enter the project and collaborate together. But in fact I don’t choose the offices per program, it’s a matter of availability. It’s a strategic question for the work, I don’t separate through the program or so. They all do the same work, including me. The structure of my office is just a secretary who is there for 30 years. It is an interesting way of working, because the proposal of partnerships is different than employees, actually they are all my ex-students having their own office.

It’s a very good thing for young architects to have such experience, not many architects in the world are doing this now...

PMR- But actually in my opinion it’s not true, because architects are always associated with other architects. Today I am saying that, but at that time I didn’t realize this: I first experienced this when I did the project for the pavilion at the Expo 70 in Japan. In Brazil it was made the competition where the architect would embark to Japan alone, just carrying the project (rolinho de papel debaixo do braço). They would hire a company that would make all details and build it. I have worked with 30 Japanese architects that I have never seen in my life before, and I couldn’t even speak their language.
It means that we always associate ourselves to many other architects and not only that, but also engineers, structure, electrical, mechanic of soil and acoustics specialists, we work with many teams. We don’t do anything by ourselves. I must assume the responsibility of the project. It is not a project of a group. I put he proposition and they develop it.

And in the case of your latest project in Madrid and Vigo, how was the process of finding the local collaborators?

PMR- I always start everything in Sao Paulo. Then because of adequate technology, it is better to have an office at the place and then we connect to them. But actually I was invited to work in those projects. Because a project is an unchaining of actions. It’s normal in human life the finding of other people with the same interests. Architecture is not a mystery, it’s very easy.

You have a very strong engineering side of you as a designer, in the structures. Actually you don’t use the engineering to show off the structure, but what is its motive behind the engineering capabilities when designing?

PMR- Historically, I suppose, it’s like a mosque, it’s all construction, but that says something. Architecture is a discourse. Of knowledge, desires, opportunities. The architect never does something for himself.

Architecture has a consuming luxury side in many countries. It still hasn’t reached the social level. How the architect can work for this social awareness of this responsibility?

PMR- In a journalistic way the answer is that actually the architect belongs to the elite. We must educate the elite.

Can we do it?
PMR- It’s a way to say. Architecture is more important than a particular for of knowledge and should influence all the knowledge and politics. Because of that the prestige of the architect is not worthless. I imagine that architecture becomes more and more important in the universe, universe as a school, a centre of knowledge. Because in this way, architecture can influence on other fields of knowledge: Linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, because we live in the formation of a consciousness about nature. Nature as something not stable, a passage, and we belong to the nature, the intelligent part of the nature. We were not born human, we are animals. Becoming human is a task for humankind. Some people say this has nothing to do with architecture, but it’s not true, this all needs to be talked by architects. The techniques is a human way to see the nature, through it you discover the secrets and truth of nature. A stone that falls you cut it in geometrical shape and with it you make a cathedral; so in this sense, this is the human, nature, in transformation, so the object of the architecture is this transformation. All this is not natural, but it’s all nature. If you put two stones, one next to the other, and then again and again, you introduce the beauty of geometry in the stone. And you can read this as a design. And you see how from magma we have stones, and from there, for instance, in the mosques, you make all those patterns, it’s a human design.

Rem Koolhaas calls it a petrified knowledge...

PMR- No, I don’t agree. It’s a live knowledge. Knowledge belongs to us, and not to the stone.

Can the capital owners able to read this knowledge?

PMR- I believe in this moment that it’s useful to speak in terms of capitalist and not capitalist.

Are they able to understand what they are building or are they looking for superficial images?

PMR- I don’t know, I am not an anthropologist. This condition of nature becomes an universal consciousness, like popular culture in the middle ages, it’s a moment of transformation, as Berkley says, it’s a common sense. We are just stupid humans. The disaster in this case is good, when disaster happens, it becomes urgent to act. In this consciousness, we can disappear like many groups of animals. And we are organizing world summits and meetings for discussing that. The planet is little. We are essaying the essence of human life in the universe. We have laboratories on the space. We have a certain humour to call the satellite that is collecting fragments of comets as Stardust, it’s song recorded by Tommy Dorsey. So in this moment it’s impossible to think about this expansion around the universe if the planet is rotten. We must transform the matrix of human life. In this sense, in this limiar of condition of the planet, we cant say “these people with money, without money, etc”. It’s just a matter of human condition, we have slowly this consciousness. To have an architectural image of all this: the supreme monument in this moment is the house. It’s impossible to imagine a rich house or a poor house. The housing in the city needs potable water, light... it’s impossible to think of a kilowatt for rich and a kilowatt for poor... a teacher, the muezzin, they say to all. Education is the fundamental question in this moment in the world. Because the man is used to use the knowledge as an instrument of operation, as the father with the son. Knowledge is an instrument of liberty.

So the architect has to serve to the democratic open space, for everybody?

PMR- People say that, not architects. It’s like in medicine, if you are a doctor, you may open a clinic for idiotic people, or you may study nutrition, of wider fields. There is no space for this type of people or so on. You are a woman, you can’t be a Turkish woman, maybe you pretend, you intend, but you are a human. I am an architect, doesn’t matter that I am Brazilian. Culture became an instrument of operation, when you say “my culture...”. Culture is something you cultivate, not finished. We have no destination, we decide what we want to do. The thing is that the most important thing is to do what you have to do, but don’t talk about it. Don’t start saying things about your work... my problem is that I can’t resist friends. And all this what I am talking is not mine, or new, it’s something related to what has been saidby contemporary philosophy, how ideas are able to seduce your life.

Do you write?

PMR- No, only the indispensable things of memorials, etc.

But I have seen your sketches together with sentences.

PMR- I don’t write. It’s very difficult to write. Writing is like architecture, you must be able to construct ideas.

What is the reflection on your work about what other people write about you? Do you read what people like Sophia Telles writes about you, and also the books, how is this absorbed by you?

PMR- It’s like any human production. You do something and other talk about it. This is a dangerous question, I don’t exactly know what they are talking. It’s a problem for the others, and not me. If there is an influence, it’s not good, it would be a bad one. But I don’t think about theory when I do architecture. I only use this kind of theory “how will I do this or that?”.

I was thinking that when he was thinking about architecture and nature, and in his case, certain invisibility on his work... as we can read on his projects, the open space, you don’t want to create a conflict between built space and non-built space...

PMR- I want to build in a way without contradictions and conflicts. Because this is necessary to build a house or a school. Everything that is new in this planet must not be contradictory with nature.

What do you think then about Oscar Niemeyer’s work then?

PMR- I think he is a very great constructor. All those constructions are beautiful. The Brazilian Cathedral, for instance. Think about the domes, specially that one in Firenze. There is the fundamental question in the domes. You can’t deform a circle used in an uniform way, if you are able to make it with arches made of stone, or whatever material. At the dome in Firenze, the lower circle works in shear, and the superior in compression. When Brasilia was done, we had the liquid stone, the concrete, and the logic is inverted, where the inferior circle is the one with compression and the upper one with shear. In the first moment you can imagine it’s a fantasy, but it’s not. Imagine a roman arch, the development till Agrippa, where you have the secondary half-dome to resist the secondary forces, and the extension of the dome. If you are inside the interior of the little chapel, and rectify all the chapels side by side, what you have is like a wing with many pillars. And with the pre-stressed concrete you do only one of those wings, two pillars and two domes, you do something like Niemeyer has done n the Memorial da América Latina in São Paulo. And with the pillar on the outside and the internal space, we do something that we wanted to do centuries ago. It’s a development of a human reflection.

Talking about his project for the Copan building, for instance. Some prototypes are acceptable in housing. It’s good to have some buildings in the city, where the ground floor is open, and there is a good position concerning the sun, etc. We all know how a building works and how it should be done. There are no structural problems in these days, it’s easy with the concrete. But concerning the thickness of the building, then appears one big structural problem, the wind. If you curve the building, as Niemeyer has done in São Paulo in Copan building, you solve this problem, in the centre of the city, where there is subway, shops, cafes, and every storey is a piece of this wind bracing system. People are jealous of Niemeyer, nobody says that this is an intelligent idea. This discourse brings to another larger discussion.

We have short ressources, Lord Palumbo mentioned in his speech the other day: we have 7 notes, and with that we make a symphony, 25 letters and we have Shakespeare, Anatole France, Dante... it’s a construction of the work.

Like a chair, with its four legs...

PMR- It’s always the same chair.... So it’s a beautiful reflection of history, because we have history as an experience, and not talking. I think like that. Why are you able to construct the minarets so tall? Because in this point, it’s so thin that there is no wind forces.

PMR- For Istanbul the problem is public transportation and housing for all.

Do you think a urban planner has to be a good architect?

PMR- Every architect is an urbanist.

Interview with Kees Christiaanse in Istanbul

2007-12-06T06:18:00.000+02:00

Sevin Yildiz: First of all, I would like to specially ask you about masterplans. As an urban planner do you think that masterplans are still valid in this century where everything is changing so rapidly, so unexpectedly? In our country, we, as architects and planners, have a little bit of a suspicion towards masterplans because it takes too much time to do it and afterwards it looses its validity. And, as a tool mostly we can not use it very effectively, so I would like to ask you your approach upon this subject?

Kees Christiaanse: We love to make masterplans exactly, because of the reasons that you just mentioned. Nowadays, you can not design a region, and then because of implementation reasons, it can only be ready in the next ten years. It’s not possible, because in every two years something else happens. So, you must work with something that takes into account unexpected social, demographic, political conditions, that can work with different speeds or accomodate varying programs, that has all kinds of flexibilities. Now the question is can you make a masterplan or not? We say “yes” because, we have been developing a working method in making masterplans that have this potential of flexibility, but at the same time, have a very strong quality of public space and also very strong quality in design principles.
So, for instance, we prepeare masterplans which have a very self-evident basic structure and sustainable for many years probably.And, then we test different phasings and rules on the building plots which are also flexible. So, we experiment with the valids between flexibility and fixation. Therefore in that respect, we think it’s very interesting to make masterplans nowadays. We also find it necessary, because if you do not make masterplans, it brings a total anarchy. In addition to that if you make fixed urban visions, you have no way of getting there again.

ŞY: So, that’s a new definition of masterplan in your own way…
KC: Yes, that’s our definition of a masterplan. It is a sustainable framework for a development that accomodates different programs at different time speed on different circumstances. However, it has basic design qualities, therein it’s not a planning tool, nor it ain’t only based on administrative aspects, it is really a design tool. So we fix certain elements that you think are very important and which we think are also long lasting.
ŞY: And, then you change it according to the dynamics…
KC: Yes, certainly. And here after masterplaning becomes very attractive.
ŞY: But in fact it is not very practical in terms of the situation that we don’t have stable economical and political conditions. It takes more than flexibility in our countries for a masterplan to be successful.
KC: That’s true. And, the second step is the process. You have to indicate the right process. Therefore we’d always try to make the correct masterplans but also design the process as a daily subject for people to talk with each other.
ŞY: Maybe that’s even more important…
KC: That’s at least as important as that.Because otherwise, the quality of your masterplan may come less strong. So, we have been trying to do that in situations with bad economy, like Eastern Germany, where there is no growth, but only ruins. We have been testing it in other areas where there are a lot of squatters, and it seems to work. So I think this methodology could be adapted to here very well, for instance, in this city. I would be very eager to test the way we work here, in an area, to transform the area. Not to wipe out the area and build something new, but to transform it.
Gulin Senol: I want to ask you something about the “mixed function”, “mixed use”. It’s been too long since architects and urban planners have left the progress of “segregation” which shapes and segregates cities to function, for instance, here is working area, there is housing area, etc.
But segregation is still here and I think it’s getting more dangerous. Because, if one does not know how to define segregation correctly, segregation process can dominate big areas of cities and can turn them to satellites.
KC: That’s true.
GŞ: Since you are describing your project as “mixed-use”, I want to ask you, what is your point of view of “segregation”?

KC: There are a lot of urban situations in which you can not very well influence the condition of mono-functionality, that there is only one function. For example, business blocks or shoping malls or things like that.Today, there is a tendency to generate a kind of mono-functionality and consequently produce segregated unity. For instance, legislation in the Netherlands prevents housing to be completely mixed up with enterprises, and so there are housing estates next to business blocks.

This is a problem, but on the other hand, you can work on it in a strategical way.For instance, you can work with “mixed use” in a kind of homeopathic way: Like a kind of acapuncture.As an example, you have a business park area and you say: “Ok, we can not mix it up with housing but we can put some strategic points here and there”, where you make public services, some small concentration of housing, some recreation facilities. So the whole area is mainly still a segregated area but you have certain points into it where you bring to life with other functions, and that works. A good example is the Silicon Valley in San Francisco: First of all, it was a university campus, with these soft enterprises and computer industries,it became a big business part. But at a certain point it became so dense that they attracted restaurants, hotels, housing, etc. Gradually, it became a city in the end. Therefore we can not prevent trends to mono-functionality and segregation completely. However we may have strategy on technical instruments in the urban design aspect that we determine its strategic points, conditions for the development of auto-functions. And, these auto functions could be when they are right and strong enough to give these situations a little bit of better urban condition.
If you say that it’s bad and we should mix up everything, you might be right but it is not possible at the moment. It’s not in accordance to social and economical tendencies today. Saying “ok then, we are lost, segragation is there and this is only bad” is not true, because if you work hard you can derive successfull tasks under these circumstances. But of course together with this segregation, we have what is much more dangerous; the aspect of scale jump-enlargement of scale.
Here, in this area you have all kinds of houses and functions. And, in the periphery you have a block of 200 meters which is only shopping mall. Now the danger in old cities is that these old neighbourhoods are being replaced by only one function, which is even more dangerous than the aspect of segregation and new developments.Also there we are working we call it homeopathic interventions because they are very thin, great small interventions, and injections. If you make them very good and strong, in the right position, then they will have a sort of effect.
ŞY: Do you think that this “mixed functioning” is an alternative for also social-function between social groups? I mean, how far does it work? Like replacing the workers in a restaurant with socially disadvantaged people, maybe it works in one example but in another example, like placing high income resdiences just next to offices or any other commercial places with socially disadvantage people…How does the tension work there?
KC: It depends on the type of city and the country you’re working on.
ŞY: So, “mixed functioning” can vary according to different…
KC: Yes, I think so. In general, people should not be too afraid of it. In fact, it is less problematic than people think. Like the fact that you have all this gated communities here. Most of these gated communities the walls are not necessary because they will not have any problem. They only have a psychological wall around them. The same is probably applicable to the situations where a more luxurious environment is settled close to a poorer environment. It is a problem in countries where there is a lot of violence, like Brasil. But European countries aren’t like Turkey. I don’t think it is a problem at all. It is even contributing to the process of development and gentification, which is good for the city anyway. I don’t know, you have here this example of American Embassy, haven’t you? I don’t know exactly what happened but…
ŞY: Yes…You should see the new one.
KC: Yes, I saw it from a boat in the Bosphorus.
ŞY: Well, you should see the neighborhood it is located in. I mean, it’s just like a castle on top of a hill where a low income neighbourhood is cituated. So, people are very disturbed by its presence, because of high security reasons there.
KC: The security problem is terrible.
Omer Kanipak: In that neighbourhood, it also has a small American living.
GŞ: Yes, there is a Dounkin Doughnut…
KC: But, before the Embassy, it was a poor neighbourhood, right?
GŞ: Yes.
ŞY: Yes, quiet poor; it’s still poor one. When the Embassy moved there, they did a security check. They checked the homes of all the people, checked the records of the people living there, so it was just like the whole neighbourhood was checked.
ÖK: Can you show examples of your projects; especially the one is in Netherlands? The question of secutiry comes to my mind; I think it is not a very big issue, especially in Netherlands because you can not create open public spaces in the neighbourhood or even in the appartment blocks. But security is a big problem, especially in Istanbul or in big metropols. If you had the chance to design a social housing, for example in Istanbul, what would be your tools?
KC: That’s a good question. But I must say that certain parts of Amsterdam and certain parts of Rotterdam are more dangerous than Istanbul; because we have the problem of immigrants. The Dutch state has been too tolerant and does not control these groups. This ended up with the formation of certain areas, where one can not walk on the street; one can not take the metro at night. This is ridiculous. The situation is similar to Paris, to the banlieues around Paris, they have had these rights. We have also had these rights, same kind of rights. And, you also have it in London. There you also have it, in areas like Brixton you have this security problem. But you don’t have it in Germany at all.
Therefore, while we have been designing a social house in such a poor neighbourhood in Amsterdam, we deviced a set of criteria to be designed and implemented in the scheme which is directly connected to the social control. Istanbul is a very safe city with 15 million people; I think one of the reasons of this safety is the social control in the neighbourhood. I think the social control is a much better instrument to arrive social security than cameras, walls and fences. So, for instance, what we did was we said, we make appartment buildings, but we make as many front doors of appartments on the ground floor so that everybody has his own letterbox and has his own territory entrance. So this is one point of the project which is not always possible. Then we connected a maximum of, for instance, 8 to 10 appartments in one status so that everybody knows eachother and that the distance to the front door is very close. Then we make much glass, in this way you have a transparent view, then we make all the ground level parts of the buildings inhabited. They are not circles with storages or parkings but they are ground level active zones with people who live there or work there. Then, the public space, we do not make a nice garden or lawn but we gave to the people in the flats, also the people in the top, little gardens. So, people start to care for their environment. And, we have a completion of all this interventions. In the end, for instance we have a much higher level of social security in that area than somewhere else.
ÖK: You add a human factor as a design element.
ŞY: As intermedia.
KC: Yes, that’s right.
GŞ: How do you define the social meaning of “sustainability”? While talking about “sustainability”, generally it is given point to its ecological meaning, but it is very necessary to bring social cohesion…
KC: Exactly.
GŞ: …and make the place vibrant.
KC: Did you read our list about it?
GŞ: Yes, I did.
KC: Because we have a kind of expression says that dominant “social sustainability” and “sustainable technology” are real “sustainability”. Expressing the “sustainable technology”, we say that “you don’t use much energy and you have to clean water and have a water management etc.”, but then nobody say; “All right, what is urban social sustainability?”
At this point we have to check the list of criteria. It’s that we do not make urban design as a tabula rasa, transformation concept, and unexpectedness of flexibility, that we make very efficient land use, that we work on the transition between public and private, that we work on the collective control and the maintenance of public space by the inhabitants, that we create active pontages on the ground level, etc. I’m always tied to design of neighbourhood according to those criterias.
GŞ: In your lecture at Istanbul Bilgi University, while you were talking about your housing complex you used the term of “socializing machine” for your house. It’s very interesting to depict a house as a “socializing machine”, because of the increasing number of gated communities and demands for gated communities. At this point, it’s very interesting to make the city centre attractive for families. What is your strategy to make the city center and make the house attractive?
KC: It is very true. It’s not so easy; and also cultural. For example, the German people are more likely to live in the city than Dutch people. Dutch people are a bit like Americans; they were farmers and after the war, they became wealthy and hold houses. So, they’re like suburban people more than living in the city. And the German people are much more used to living in cities because they also have very beautiful 19th century neighbourhoods. They are very nice and unique areas. Scilicet it depends on the country, region and culture.
However, let’s say generally there is a tendancy of families with children to go out of the city. It is like an American dream: Big house with a car. You can see it everywhere; we have seen exactly the same neighbourhood in Shangai, exactly the same neighbourhood in Florida and in Moscow. So, that is a kind of a global city idea which everybody likes and the consequences that the city itself is abandoned of families, that only the poor families, students, artists, stay there.
So socially disembalanced situations occur. Sometimes it becomes to a very bad situation like in Detroit. Detroit is a horrible city, completely human wrecked.
GŞ: Detroit is really horrible city.
KC: So, we try in Holland, to return certain amount of people with families back into the city. And we have two good conditions to do that. First thing is we have many harbour areas in cities that are abandoned. And the second thing is that these harbour areas are owned by the city. Therefore, the land price can be determined by the city and can be kept low. So you can get housing in, if the prices will be commercial, like on the Bosphorus, you’ll be able to make housing. So, with these two advantages we have in the Netherlands, we’ll be able to get low rise, high density housing for families back into the city.
ÖK: Is it working?
KC: Yes, It’s working a little bit.
ÖK: But, what happens to the rural areas? All the people are coming to cities, are they emptied?
KC: No.It’s not so dramatic. The percentage of these harbour areas, these family residents in relation to the people living around the city is very low. It’s very little. But, it helps to bring the city to a better condition. But of course there is still the development of green fields going on. However that’s a very contradictory situation because we have a very small country. It’s about the size of the European part of Turkey. And there are about fifteen or sixteen milion people. So it’s about same conditions with Istanbul in that respect. And you drive in two hours from one end to the other. Now the strange condition is that we have enough space left because it was a farmland, and the farmers are stopping to produce because the farmers do not make money any more. So they move to Poland or to Canada. And we get our milk from Poland. So the part of the country site is being developed because it is not agricultural any more. But there is a kind of anti-urban movement that tries to prevent more settlement being in the land. So we have the strange thing that the fields are not used. That they are artificial, not natural.They are not allowed to be used for development too much. Therefore nobody knows what to do with them.
ÖK: And the birth rate is not too high. So the population is quiet stable.
KC: It’s quiet stable. And now it’s first year, this year it’s going down.
ÖK: Actually, that means that the development would stop?
KC: Yes, I think it will automatically stop. The strange thing what you see now is that people create this beautiful circumstance, they recreate water. Formerly we took land from the water, water was our enemy, and now we make water again in order to make nice houses on the water.It is very strange. But, I think development will gradually stabilize, because I think the population will more or less stabilize. We will get older, we have this aging problem.
ÖK: You don’t have so much immigration problem recently as much as past years?
KC: No, not any more…
ÖK: Is it a good thing? What do you think about the future of the Nederlands? I mean, should the development and economy be steady?
KC: I think the economy is little bit in danger maybe because there are not enough people. But you could also imagine that gradually what adapts to having less people. I mean a country like Finland is only 4 million people, ten times bigger than Holland and also is wealthy.
ŞY: Maybe focusing on one type of industry, I mean Finnish people are doing like IT technologies and timber work…
KC: In Holland we almost don’t have industry. So it is trade, services and transport distribution. The Dutch have all the truck companies and all the world companies, the courier services, etc.
ŞY: At this point I would like to ask you a question, because we have a recent problem, as architects we also can not understand the process, we have a huge pressure on the housing industry in Turkey now, maybe you also have observed, we have like 114 housing projects that are under construction right now in Istanbul and none of them are social housing. And they have huge surface areas so, I would like to ask you as a planner, what is the reason of pressurizing housing so much and what is expected as dynamic of housing. While people are desining housings, what are their expectations? I think it should not be only about immigration rate. In Berlin, I know that people were expecting a lot of immigration ten years ago and they built many houses, people didn’t come, the houses stayed same and now a lot of housing are empty. And we are currently constructing huge amount of housing so, what is your opinion about this?
KC: Maybe in that respect Netherlands is a good example, because in the Netherlands we built millions of houses after the war, social housing, big apartment buildings which are now being taken down. This is not so bad, because they have served 30- 40 years and they have been built for a condition that is not present any more. The condition was more or less an emergency condition after the war. And, what you see now is that because of all these apartments were in the hands of housing cooperations or the city, they can just decide to take them down or sell them. So, what happens now? They’ll be replaced some low-rise apartments. We do exactly the reverse of what happens here; we are taking down the high-rise and replacing it by dense and low-rise. Here you are taking down the “gecekondu” (slutter) and replacing them by high-rise ones.
ŞY: And, we won’t maybe have the opportunity to reverse it because it will be private ownership. All this houses are now done by the city itself. So they will be privately owned and will be used for investment in the end.
ÖK: But, I think that market economy will find its way in the future.
ŞY: But I’m asking that you think that it works in that way, the market economy is finding its way or like in the Berlin example…
KC: Let’s say it in the different way. What people here are trying to do now, I think is understandable out of needed housing capacity, but I think, that the urban designs and the typology is wrong. I think that it is possible to make very qualitative housing and neighbourhoods here, that are high density, that are not high-rise towers and that have kind of flexible system and can adapt ot future. And I think that is more the key to work on. You create other typologies that meet the demand of the housing market; because that is also an economical engine for the welfare of the city. Building production anyway, is a very positive economic force for the development of the city. But the question is how do you do that? And what happens now is if they go on like they do now, you’ll have all the slutter (gecekondu) areas gone and the towers everywhere…
ŞY: Not only the gecekondu areas I am suspecting that also the industrial and trade zones are under the pressure of this housing boom. I was going to ask you, in this manner, that you are always telling about the flexibility in post-industrial areas. Of course, when something is post it’s easier to reckon or to plan that area, but we have areas like we are in a trans-industrial process now like in Mexico City or like Johannesburg. We are still producing but we are in a transition period and soon it will be replaced by something else. It’s very critical to work on this just in this phase of transition.
KC:True, however on the other hand, Turkish industry is very good, you know.
ŞY: In the case of Istanbul, I think it is not that positive, because we know the textile industry has undergone serious problems. So, the industry in Istanbul which is mainly textile will be replaced by something else, we are just in the period of transition.
KC: As you know these things are very difficult to predict.Because, the textile here is also in crisis because of the low rates in Romania, Ukraine, and China. Nobody would expect 10 years ago that it would be so bad. So, I think there are always these kinds of very strong changes in cities, due to certain influence from the world that nobody can predict. In a way the same thing happens in the Netherlands, in the harbours, the ship building industry. We had a big industry 25-30 years ago, which was a ship building industry. And there were extreme harbour activities. The ship industry died becasue of Korean and Japanese were making the same ships for half of the price. So the whole Dutch ship industry is dead. It was one thousand year old.
GŞ: What about the car industry? Because you know that, at low price car production, Chinese are…
KC: We don’t have a car industry. That is for the Germans. So one of the core businesses of the culture with a history of thousand years was gone within ten years. And the second thing is that harbour activities faced such a scale enlargement that the harbours in the neighbourhoods of cities were abandoned and much bigger harbours were created outside. So you have these two events that had total radical effect on the economy of the city. Work left the city, the activity left the city, whole type of economic factors left the country. The factor of these abandoned industrial areas can’t turn to be positively. So, if we can densify the city within its borders, we can build very high qualitative sites.
ÖK: Maybe you know about the in Istanbul there is a current tendency into emptied ship yards around the Golden Horn area, the touristic places, also small scale work shops around neighbourhood, the tendency to homogenize places, which is not used by the citizens but used by the tourists only. How do you think that it can be prevented? You have similar experiences in other countries or in other cities?
KC: I think the ship building activity is changing by itself. But, for instance, here down in the Golden Horn, you have all these lamp shops and iron shops that the city government wants to move outside of these big buldings, I find very wrong.Because, you can much better accompany these neighbourhoods by urban renovation, by helping property of real estate, balancing it, by upgrading on buildings, so that people who are renting or having those shops will also have kind of a regeneration value and automatically some of this iron shops will go. The poorer and less smart ones will not survive in those areas when the rents increase. Then you get a kind of leveling out and a process of gentrification which is much more human, personal gentrification. And also is much more sensible for the preservation of the public space and fine grain of the neighbourhood. So, I think you can definitely develop policies for these kinds of economic activities. And I think these kinds of massive deportations are completely wrong.
GŞ: At this point I want to ask you about the urban… Especially tourism and consumption are being used as urban renewal tools because these areas must be attractive and profitable for investors; because the first goal of investors is to get huge profit in the short term and tourism is able to give this.
At this point, is it possible to describe an urban renewal project which is not profit bringing? Is it possible to exclude market forces?
KC: No, but let’s say depends on the site. If you go to end of the Golden Horn where the Santral is being build, there you can also work with neighbourhood, participation, kind of social programs and you can get a kind of low profile revitalization going on, least work with small profits or small parties. But of course, here in the center, in the end the global tourism will gain. There is nothing to stop it. You see it already in the bazaar. The bazaar could also be in Holywood or the center of London.
ŞY: Did you also realize the change in Istiklal Street, the shops, etc.
KC: Yes, completely changing.
ÖK: And there is also a steady homogenization process is going on both in the bazaar and in touristic areas. For example, if I were a tourist coming Istanbul, I would like to see more different varieties in the bazaar. All you can see is the gold shops and carpet sellers, nothing else.
KC: I mean the Bazaar is a real example of international tourism. If you go to the bazaar people say there are 500 shops but there are only 5 shops: one for Turkish delight and herbs, one for carpets, one for souvenirs and water pipes, one for scarves, and one for gold, so that’s all there. So, there are only five shops, they sell the same and have the same price, and it’s very difficult to look for something special.
ÖK: What do you think about the future of tourism? I think the mass tourism is going to die in the future because of the ever-broading communication matters. I mean because you don’t need to see by your eyes, you can visit by mass communication tools. You see by television by internet…
KC: No, I don’t think so. I think the most beautiful cities like Istanbul; will have an eternal and ever-increasing attraction for tourism. For instance, in Amsterdam which used to be popular for Japanese starting at the end of 60’s, became completely boomed in 70’s and beginning of the 80’s, now it’s going down but who is coming now to Amsterdam? The Rich Chinese! Chinese is an unlimited resource.
ŞY: For everybody in the world…
KC: Yes…For instance, you see suddenly enormous mass of Czechs and Polish people coming to Amsterdam. I think Istanbul has a very big attraction for whole Asia. They come from Azerbaijan, they come here from Ukraine. So I’m a little bit pessimistic about the force of international tourists. I think, it’s so powerful and profitable, and it is such a good political tool for politicians to make their city more beautiful. I think Istanbul will be like Barcelona, if it goes on like this.
ŞY: Do you know anything about Haydarpaşa Port area transformation? Do you know where Haydarpaşa is?
KC: That’s on the other side. You mean the scheme of Zaha Hadid?
ŞY: No, no. She didn’t design anything there. You know this port area of Haydarpaşa, Harem?
KC: Yes, yes. Where the two towers…
ŞY: Yes. The two towers of University Of Marmara. The city is planning to move the harbour to the out skirts of the city and use that plot as a tourism area and international fair area for the future, and they gave the comission to different architects and they are now designing a project like a gated visit area for the future, where they will have this international fair activities, high-income residences, conference areas and some public space they say. But it will surely be like a satelite city.
ÖK: Like forum 2004 in Barcelona…
KC: Yes, something similar.
ÖK: But in a much larger scale…
GŞ: There would also be housing…
ŞY: In my interview with the architect of the project, he claims that there will also be social hosuing but I am not very sure how will he survive with all of these. I think it will probably be for the service people who will work in the area. So, we think that it will be like a satelite within the city. The cruvazier ships will come and bring tourists and then, take the tourists from there and go away. So, what will be your comment on this kind of transformation within the city?
KC: Let’s say, it could be done. But first of all it should be a masterplan that should be processed rather than a fixed vision so that they could change, what is very important in these kind of development is a fine grain of connectivity, which means that the street pattern within it, should be maximum small and maximum connected to the surrounding street pattern, should not be closed, definitely not. Maybe some small exhibition areas but should not be closedas a whole. So, it should be a living neighbourhood. And then you should work on the different balance of functions. I would not say that would not be possible, but it would always be building in anticipation and procedures and criteria so that it would be part of the city, instead of a kind of an isolated bowl.
ÖK: The problem in Haydarpaşa is I think, they just started by just drawing.
ŞY: A fixed vision and without any masterplans…
ÖK: Everyone wants to see the drawings and the renderings, at first.
ŞY: And the whole discussion was carried on from the idea of finding a symbol for the city of Istanbul, as if it does not have a symbol with the mosques and the silhouette. They are claiming that they’re bringing a new symbol for the city with those seven skyscrapers, in that area. The area is across the historical peninsula. The whole discussion was started from a different point. That was the idea.
KC: Of course, we always have the problem when we make a masterplan like I have just told you. We have to make drawings, what it looks like, in some or other way or build models, because in other way, people, professionals can’t understand it. At this point the danger is that almost immediately they take this picture or model seriously, as the fixed vision. Ask for completely different ways of presentation. The best thing is to build a big model, because in a model you can make three blocks for one block and than make changes and explain people that there are different possibilities, and that works very well. And, I think of course you should make drawing, system, make a vision, and build models for that. But the way you do it is very different in all kind of vision, fixed vision and all kind of changeable vision.
The problem is we are now in a time in Europe; we have the 70’s when everybody was against everything, so nothing happened. Then we have the 80’s when everybody said; “Hippie’s days passed, and now we’re going to do business”, everything was like mysterious things. Then in 90’s they discovered, there were so much legislation, political procedures, so they can not do that like in 60’s, they have to connect the people to the city, and blend. And, so, if I would characterize our attitude against the design now, in relation to such a project, I would say; “This is a bad project, you should forget about it.” I would be a Don Quixote.
If I had said; “Yes, ok, I also want to do it”, I would be a kind of architect who only thinks himself.
But as a contemporary urbanist I would say “Oh yes, if we’re going to build it, let’s use the economic force, and we should than canalize this forces into more sustainable projects than to a one that will be dead”. This is the difference.
ÖK: Turkey did not have so many experiences in large scale urban transformation. How does it operate in Europe, for instance in the large areas, and how is the program fixed? Who gives the program? Is it government or is there a special comission formed by the private investors and government? How is it working?
KC: Mostly there is a development corporation which has represantatives of the city, developers, architects, investors and cultural institutions, they’re making a kind of concept program, concept scenario, and during the invitation this is continously tested also by real estate agents. So in that term, a project like in Hambourg, in the harbour, it is monitored all the time and changed all the time. But there, for instance, in the Netherlands, are very famous, they are just making a housing program and the building is ready.
I think a very good example is the city of Bilbao; because they also have a corporation: the director of museum, mayor, the director of the electricity and water works and the director of metro and trainway company, big industries… They are sent from the state and these people together make development scenarios or economic or cultural hipotalization, together they work in one goal, and you see that they’re very successful. And, everybody thinks that the costs of the development of Bilbao is about one billion Euros, and everybody think that it has been paid by the EU, but less than %10 was paid by the EU, most of it they financed themselves over loans of the government that they paid later.
I think, there are a lot of great things in Turkey.As an example, there are lots of international companies. In that respect, these people have to get rid of them they have to get revenues and I think it would be ideal if there were convenient conditions in which people can start to develop. It needs a good regulation of investment.
GŞ: You are defining three classifications for urban areas: Branding, relaxing and waiting lands. Which is more suitable for Haydarpaşa port?
KC: I think it is maybe an official waterfront project; because it is considered as very representative (?) politically.
GŞ: So it is a branding land?
KC: Yes I think so. It sounds bad but I don’t think that it’s necessarily bad; it depends on how you do it.
ŞY: I have a last question. We had an interview with Micheal Sorkin and what he mentioned was very similar to your idea of “archipelago”. He was also saying that to sustain the city life which will be the reality of next century we have to live in smaller cities. We have to focus on smaller cities with less population. So in other words, we have to devide the cities into parts or have to create smaller cities, so it reminded me of your “archipalago” proposal, which is very convincing and sustainable itself, but I have one question about the social dynamic of this approach. When you create “archipelago” or “smaller cities” you are creating, a different city which is connected to the city itself. Like, in the Dutch example you have different types of settlements which are connected to the city of Amsterdam or in the housing example. What do you think about the cohesion of the city image or city identity with the concept of “Archipelago” smallest city concept? Do you think that it has a contribution to the city identity itself directly or it is weakening the city image?
KC: No, this “archipelago” identity is very much meant as an identity which is not presuming that the islands are too independent. But that the islands together form a hierarchical system in which the old center is the most important one. And, I think that is the difference with the so-called periphery people who think that all these islands can be completely different and fragmented having nothing to do with each other. And, I showed the concept of Helsinki because it is clearly the concept that the islands have their own position but at the same time they are contributing organ to the organism as a whole, in which the central city is the most important part and I think that’s very important because many classical urbanists provoked the compact city and many of the peripherists provoked the disintegration of the city but the factor we look, for instance, that’s unique in Amsterdam, also probably in Istanbul, you see that there are some places that are focal, the most important, like here this area of Taksim is really the center of agglomeration. The agglomeration is deviding into a lot of different hills and islands, whatever, but they all have a certain position and relation to the center. And I think you should develop this idea of archipalago in the relation of this hierarchy, not in the idea of isolation.
ŞY: So, what you mean actually is not defining something new, but, to redefine something which is already existing, like to look at Istanbul’s hierarchy, it’s been the centers, valleys and the hills and define a new concept out of that.
KC: Yes, exactly.
ŞY: So, in that way it will be something contributing to the city, it won’t be something disintegrating.
KC: So it is going to probably anounce the identification too.
GŞ: You are defining KCAP as a non-ideological group. What do you mean by “being ideological”?
KC: We are not ideological…Well, I’ve always had a big difficulty with the word of “ideological” because, that’s very much 70’s. The most characterized thing which people say is that we are radical pragmatists. In a way, it is true because we do not first build up a theory of urbanism and then implement it on the city but we write our theme from the practical work in the city. And, in that respect we could say that we are not so ideological.
ÖK: Would you like to be ideological?
KC: No. But, I think that our attitude is extremely clear. I think we are very generative, almost maybe biomorphical. We look to biological analogies very much and also realize that we should not take that too serious.
ÖK: But, I mean if you compare urban planners to architects, architects much more depend on ideology and theory…
KC: Yes, this is a very good question. I think that you can not become a good urban designer if you are not an architect. There are very few examples of very good urban designers who are not architects, whose educations are not based on architecture. Same time, if you finally work on urban designs, you can discover that it is a completely different type of work than designing buildings. Because let’s say, architect works within the easthetics of his own fine taste whereas the urban designer works with everybody’s bad taste. You are the coordinate of everybody’s bad taste, which is also very easthetical. But, that’s a very big difference. So, actually we are working like a film scenario writer or a film director rather than an architect, because we work with historical, heterogenical components living in that material, whereas the architect is basically working within the logic of his own easthetics. Of course he’s talking to his clients about the program.But all is being in one style in the end.
ÖK: And, you have to invent a scheme where you can also intervent the architect’s ego and all his taste.
KC: Yes. Our job is to be able to let certain architects flourish in that qualties within the urban scheme. It depends on the kind of urban scheme that you make. Whether the architects can freak out completely in their own taste which you can put Kollhoff, Krier and Koolhas in one scheme or they should be more coherent. You can turn on these buttons.
ÖK: Do you think that the urban planning education is a bit seperated from education of architecture in Turkey?
KC: I don’t know.
ŞY: People look down on it. People who go to get an urban planning education are the ones who mostly the ones who wanted to get into architecture program but did not get enough points. It’s very tragical but it’s the case. So, that’s why we don’t have very effective and good urban designers. People don’t see that like…
KC: It’s a bit like everywhere. The original urban design discipline is very much based on the planning discipline which is mostly people who can not design at all. The best urban designs still have been made by architects.
GŞ: What do you think about the architecture education system in Holland?
KC: Well, I’m teaching in Zurich. I think the school of architecture in Holland, at this moment, is not in so good condition.
ŞY: And, also I think that the architectural setting is not doing that well. They have this kind of hesitation. The government has cut the subsdies for experimental work. And, the smaller offices are struggling. And, now the big Dutch architects are all over the world working away. And, I have read in an article, that the younger generation who has graduated recently is under an identity problem.
KC: That’s true. I think their education is not really very bad; there are very good schools like in Europe. DTH is very good one, that’s why I went there. And, DAA is also quiet good. Also in Germany there are some good ones and in that average quality, in Delft, they are not bad but they are also not very good.
ŞY: They don’t have distinctive kind of…
KC: No, not any more. I studied in Delft. I was taught by Bekamaa, Koolhaas, Jan Ritveld and that was really good time.
GŞ: You did work with OMA, didn’t you?
KC: Yes, I was the director of OMA, from 1980 to 1988. But as you know, Rem Koolhas was my teacher, and I had to choose to be always number two or three or want to do it by myself…
ÖK: What do you think about the new project of Lille, the new masterplan?
KC: It’s not so good.
ÖK: Not working?
KC: No. It’s not working.
ŞY: I have a personal question. What do you think about Team 10?
KC: Team 10! I love it.
ŞY: Because I have sense it, you know, with your approach of the streetscape etc. It reminded me Team 10…
KC: Yes, I love it. I think they have done a very good work. And of course you have these fashion cycles. I think some of their work will come back, or probably it is coming back in now; because they are very current.
ŞY: They somehow succedded to avoid all the ideological discussions and kept their practical work…
KC: Yes, I agree.
GŞ: One more question about the perception of rapid changing. What do you think about contemporary states, cities and boundaries?
KC: Hmmm…I am not the prophet, you know. But I agree that, let’s say, travelling becomes more easy, international intellectual life style becomes more connected and interactive, which is very good for the announcement of the local culture and it leads to situations where boundaries become a little bit less important and regions become more important, that you have already seen in Europe. Collaborations between part of Gutenberg and German part of Switzerland are a good example for this.
You have all kinds of things related to that. I think that is very beautiful. I am always in favour of Turkey to join the EU. I think that’s very necessary. Because,if that does not happen, then, we will have a very strong gap between the West and the Moslem East. I think Turkey is the key country in peace making on a global scale in this situation. In that sense, I am really in favor of very transparent and connected relationship betweenTurkey and Europe.
GŞ: I heard that most people want Turkey to join the EU because of the military that we have.
OK: And because of our population.
GŞ: Yes, our huge and young population.
KC: In Europe there is a lot of xenophobia because of Al-Kaida. And because of the Moslem fundamentalism is also generating in European cities. The problem is that Europeans are not religious and so that churches are abandoned, and in their places come mosques. People are afraid. I think this is xenophobism which is dangerous. Turkey is a disciplined country, of course there are problems but, it’s relatively disciplined and transparent in relationship to other Eastern Countries. And in that respect, it would be a mistake to cut this connection.
ÖK: I always believe that Turkey is knowned by only Istanbul. When we think about investment and other things, there is a large portion of Turkey which is very abandoned. Turkey didn’t find its way in investigating smaler cities around Anatolia yet. So there is going to be, I think, a discenteralization to away from Istanbul.
KC: I think Turkey can be compared quiet well with Spain; because Spain was a dictatorship till 1980 and then, against every expectation, the young king started to democratize. There is same situation which is also in Madrid, where is artificial capital in the middle of the country. You have Barcelona which is Istanbul, which is lively, vivid, big cosmopolitan economic factor. And then you have the coast which is tourist motor, and you have the inland which is more or less rural. In that relationship it’s quiet comparable. Because of the good condition of Turkish economy, in next years you can also expect a development that is similar to the development in Spain. And, that would be of course ideal.
ÖK: The similarity between Turkey and Spain is also regionalism, that’s similar too…
KC: Yes exactly, that is also similar.
ŞY: Also, I think although we do not have enough investment opportunities, Turkey has a big potential for investment, in different parts of the country, by means of agriculture and different industry. Every region has its own way of supporting itself. If the right kind of investment goes there, I think, it will be fine.
ÖK: Investors from Europe come to Istanbul, not to Anatolia, it is much further and much more forgettable, I think. Ok, thank you very much.
KC: You’re welcome.

A Conversation on MVRDV

2006-11-23T16:02:00.004+02:00

A Conversation With Jacob van Rijs (MVRDV)

Şevin Yıldız: Bugünün mimarlık üretiminde önemli bir yeri olan MVRDV’nin ofis ortamı nasıl? Kendinizi bir tasarım merkezi olarak mı, araştırma laboratuarı gibi mi görüyorsunuz?

Jacob Van Rijs: Bizim ofisimiz bir atölye, bir stüdyo gibi. Biraz aslında loftu da andırıyor havası. Yukarıdan ışık alan eski bir endüstriyel binadayız. Çok hoş bir ortam bize göre iş ortamının güzel olması çok önemli. Ofiste herkes olanları devam eden projeleri görür. Sorunun araştırma kısmına gelirsek ise, eskiye göre daha az araştırma yapıyoruz. Biz özellikle araştırma yapalım diye araştırma yapmıyoruz. Bazı projelerimizde yer alıyor ve araştırma yapmaktan zevk alıyoruz. Mesela geçen sen bu Game 3 kitabını çıkardık. Bu kitap bizim epey zamanımızı aldı sanırım bir süre başka şeylerle ilgileneceğiz.

ŞY: Siz MVRDV olarak Europan yarışmasıyla bir araya gelip, ilk önemli başarınızı kazandınız.Sizce mimarlar için Europan yarışmasının önemi nerde yatıyor, hala bu yarışmalarda doğru kentsel meselelere değinildiğini düşünüyor musunuz?

JVR: Evet kesinlikle. Europan her iki senede bir şehre gelen bir sirk gibi. Biz ikinci etap Europan yarışmasına katılmıştık. Europan’a katılmak bir ofis kurmak için gayet iyi bir yöntem. Biz ofisimizi kurduğumuzda Hollanda’da bakanlıktan teşvik ve maddi destek alabilmek için bir yarışmada ödül kazanmak gerekiyordu ve Europan buna çok yardımcı oldu. Şimdi ise Europan eskisi kadar büyük bir etkiye sahip değil, şu ana kadar o kadar çok kazanan oldu ki. Belki de yarışmayı her iki seneden bir değil de her üç senede bir yapmak lazım.

ŞY: Siz kendi Hollanda örneğinizi göz önüne alırsanız, Europan yarışmasının doğru kentsel meselelere dokunduğunu söyleyebilir misiniz?

JVR: Hollanda için evet. Bu yarışmaya çok sayıda yabancı mimar da katılıyor. Hollanda’da kazanan yabancılar, Hollandalılardan daha fazla. İnsanlar yarışmayı Hollanda’daki mimarlık piyasasına bir giriş olarak görüyorlar. Ve bu beklenti de fazlasıyla gerçekleşiyor. Bir çok Fransız, Alman veya İngiliz ekibi Europan ile ofislerini kuruyorlar. Europan o anlamda bir erime potası da. Farklı ofislerde çalışanlar ekip kurup yarışmaya katılıyorlar. Bu nedenle mimarlığın bir sonraki kuşağında aynı ofiste çalışan çok farklı insanlar olacak.

ŞY: Neden bugünlerde mimarlık ofislerinin etnik farklılık ve çeşitlilik içermesi üzerine bu kadar vurgu yapılıyor, özellikle bir mimarlık ofis ortamı tasvir ederken?

JVR: Bence bu olumlu bir adlandırma biçimi. Bir şeyleri daha doğru organize etmek için, bizler için de iyi bir özellik. Tabii ki bu vurguyu yapmak için de abartmamak lazım bazı ofis koşulları yıl içerisinde değişkenlik gösterebilir ama gene de benim için bu her zaman geçerliliğ olan bir seçenek. Etrafımıza baktığımızda böyle bir çeşitliliğin hala çok gerekli oduğunu görürüz. Monotonluk iyi değildir, insanların bireysellikleri hala önemli ama bir yandan da organizasyon ve düzen de önemli.

ŞY: Siz bu bilgi çağının ve bilginin, özellikle çeşitli bilgi akışlarının önemli olduğu bir dönemde, mimar tanımında bir değişiklik yaptığını düşünüyor musunuz? Sizce bu derinleştirici bir etki mi yoksa ilüzyonal ve yüzeysel bir tarafı mı var?

JVR: Bence bu çağda birbirinden oldukça farklı mimar tanımları mevcut, mimar sözcüğü sadece tek bir anlam içermiyor artık. Asırlardır olduğu gibi bugün de mimarların asıl görevinin bina yapmak olduğunu savunan gelenekçi mimarlar var. Daha farklı bir grubun ise kendilerine ait bir dünyaları var ve onun dışında çıkmıyorlar. Belli okulları ziyaret ediyorlar, kendi dillerini oluşturuyorlar. Başkaları onların ne dediklerini pek de anlamıyor. Böyle birbirinden farklı birçok grup var. Ben okuldayken, mimarların bina yapması gerektiğine inanılırdı. Şu an ise bu geride kaldı artık mimar olarak bina inşa etmeniz şart değil. Bu konularda mimarlar arasında bir çok tartışma yaşanıyor. Bu zıt görüşlerdeki grupları aynı odaya koyarsanız çok komik şeyler yaşanır. Bize gelince, biz bu iki grubun arasında bir yerde duruyoruz. İki grupla da iletişim kurabiliyoruz. Biz sadece teori yapmak için teoriye veya sadece formsal deneyler yapmak için dijital teknolojilere girmiyoruz.

ŞY: Siz politik mercilerle ve bürokratlarla farklı diyaloglara sahip, zaman zaman beraber çalışan bir ekipsiniz. Bürokrasi ve politikayla iletişimi ve algıyı nasıl kurguluyorsunuz? Mesela Pigcity projesini ele alırsak.

JVR: bu proje bir tarım enstitüsü tarafından maddi olarak desteklenen bir projeydi ama içerik olarak hükümetin politikalarına dayanıyordu. Bir çeşit yorumlamaydı, bir tartışma başlatmak istedik.

ŞY: Ne kadar anlaşıldığınızı düşünüyorsunuz?

JVR: İstanbul’a gelirken uçakta, bir gazetede bizim PigCİity projemiz ile ilgili bir makale okudum. İsmimiz geçmiyordu ama bizim önerdiğimiz yüksek çiftlik yapılarına atıf vardı. Bu proje ekonomik ve ekolojik boyutları olan bir proje. Hayvan hakları savunucuları, domuzlar için yüksek yapılar önerisini duyar duymaz, sinir krizi geçiriyorlar. Ama biz aslında onlara bunun hayvan haklarını iyileştirmek adına ne kadar önemli bir proje olduğunu anlattığımızda işler değişiyor. Kimse bugün geleneksel yöntemlerle yapılan hayvancılığa şahit olmak istemez. Bu tip yerlere gittiğiniz anda vejeteryan olabilirsiniz. Bazı şeyleri hiç bilmemeyi tercih etmek daha iyidir, hayvancılık da onlardan biri. Biz işte bir nevi şizofreni olan bu durumu ortaya koymak istedik. Bugün insanlar et yemeyi tamamen bırakmayacaklarsa, bu konuyla ilgilenmemiz gerek. Projenin tüm amacı buydu ama insanlar projeyi anlamakta zorluk çektikleri için agresif davrandılar.

ŞY: Küresel ölçekte iş yapan mimarlık ofisleriyle ilgili bir soru sormak istiyorum. Siz de veriyi zaman zaman üretiminizin temeline oturtuyorsunuz, peki küresel olarak çalışan bir ofis farklı bağlamlardaki veri akışlarına kendini nasıl adapte ediyor? Nasıl bir yöntem izleniyor yerellik anlamında?

JVR: Her şey data değildir. Çok iyi bir başlangıç noktasıdır ama sadece veri ile tasarım yapılamaz. Bence veri bir şeyleri organize etmek için gerekli bir araç. Tarımda her zaman sihirli bir buluş beklenir, bazen veri de bu sihirli buluşun kendisi oluyor. Dünyada küresel olarak iş yapan mimarlara, örneğin bir Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid veya Calatrava’ya baktığımda hepsinin çok güçlü bireysel üslupları olduğunu görüyorum. Zaten dünyanın çeşitli yerlerinde iş yapmalarının ve insanların onları istemesinin sebebi de bu çizgileri. İnsanların onlardan beklentisi bunu yapmaları ve bence gayet de iyi yapıyorlar. Bizim de projelerimizi bir arada tutan bazı prensipler var ama biz üslup açısından daha özgürüz, yerel etkilere daha açığız sanırım.

ŞY: Bu etkileri işinize nasıl uyarlıyorsunuz peki?

JVR: Etrafa bakarak.

SY: Farklı ülkelerde işler yaptığınızda nasıl bir süreç izliyorsunuz, orada geçici ofisler mi kuruyorsunuz ya da oradaki mimarlar ve ofislerle mi işbirliği içine giriyorsunuz?

JVR: Tabii ki işbirliği yapıyoruz ama daha çok bir bakış açısı, yaklaşım geliştirmeye çalışıyoruz. Mesela Çin’de bir yarışmada Zaha’ya karşı yarıştık, o kazandı. Daha sonraki mimari etapta ise olaya dahil olduk ve onun önerdiği kentsel tasarım içinde bir proje geliştirdik. Gördük ki böyle bir şey neredeyse imkansız. Proje çok güçlü bir Zaha Hadid projesiydi ve bizim MVRDV olarak var olmamız çok zordu. Birkaç deneme yaptık ama sonuç çok komikti. Zaha önerilerimizi beğendi ama işveren beğenmedi. Çin’deki bu projeye baktığınızda aslında yerel sorunlarla uğraştığını görürsünüz ama düşünce ve kavramsal olarak çok farklı bir yerde duruyor.

ŞY: ‘Reading MVRDV’ adlı kitapta Bart Lootsma’nın şöyle bir tespiti var; ‘MVRDV katılımcı planlamayı daha büyük ölçekte kamusal yararlar ile ilişkilendirmek ve toplumla bir tartışma açabilmek konusunda ikna edici bir yaklaşıma sahip. Ama bu aynı zamanda onların zayıf noktası çünkü Batı Avrupa refah devletleri şu an temsiliyetçi demokrasiye olan inançlarını derinden etkileyen bir kriz içindeler.’ Buna katılıyor musunuz?

JVR: Bence biraz abartı var. Hollanda’da mimarlık ve demokrasi ile ilgili bir çok tartışma yaşanıyor ve sonuçta bazen oldukça tutucu ve gelenekçi yaklaşımlara gidiliyor. Peki bu kadar tartışılan bir konuyu ne kadar ileri taşımak gerekir? Bence Hollanda örneğinde bu demokratiklik bazı alanlarda hala geçerli. Geleneksel metodolojiler hala çok başarılı, ticari olarak başarılı çünkü işin ucunda para var. İnsanlar hala ev aldıklarında daha geleneksel evler almak istiyorlar çünkü sonradan satmanın daha kolay olacağına inanıyorlar. Aslında daha modern evleri beğenseler de içlerindeki ses ticari olarak bunun iyi olmayacağını söylüyor. Bu aslında dünyanın her yerinde olan bir durum. Modern mimarlık her zaman sürücü koltuğunda değil. Biz genelde bizim tarzımızı bilen insanlarla çalışıyoruz o nedenle bizden böyle şeyler talep etmiyorlar. Hollanda dışından aldığımız işlerde daha zekice, daha ilginç proje talepleri geliyor.

ŞY: Yani sonuçta Lootsma’nın mevcut durumu biraz abarttığını mı söylüyorsunuz?

JVR: Bir yönüyle doğru ama bir taraftan da bazen mimari üslubun hiç önem arzetmediği projeler yapıyoruz. Daha kentsel ölçekte, kentsel tasarımla ilgilendiğimiz zaman esneklik imkanı daha çok oluyor ve insanlar kendi kendileri çok şey yapıyorlar. Kendi evlerini yapıp kendi cemaatlerini oluşturabiliyorlar. Böyle olduğu zaman mimar daha çok kentsel planlama tarafında oluyor, bir nevi zonlama yapıyor. Sonuç ürün de daha çok kullanıcıya bağlı bir duruma dönüşüyor. Şu anda Hollanda’da yaptığımız projede daha çok mahalle kavramı üzerine, kentsel alanlar ve düzenlemelerle ilgileniyoruz. Politikacıların sıkça kullandığı ‘organik kentleşme’ kavramına baktığınızda bunun gelecekteki eğilim olduğunu görüyoruz. Toplum tarafından geliştirilen bir mahalle kavramı. Benzer bir durum, mimari üslup olarak farklı da olsa, 1970’lerde de vardı. Mimarlık aracılığıyla özelleştirme bizim ilgilendiğimiz konulardan biri. Bunu kendi evinizi seçebildiğiniz Silodam projesiyle gerçekleştirebildik ilk olarak.

ŞY: Materyalite hakkında ne düşünüyorsunuz, sizin yaklaşımlarınızın materyalite kavramıyla nasıl bir ilişki içerisinde?

JVR: Sanırım biz bu kavramla büyülenmiş gibiyiz. Bizim projelerimizde çok önemli bir yeri var. Bazen projenin kalbini oluşturuyor bazen de yapılıp bitmesi gereken bir şey haline dönüşüyor. Şu son zamanlarda malzeme projelerimizde daha da önemli bir hale geldi. Daha önceki projelerimizde mekansal organizasyonlar daha ön plandaydı. Ama dediğim gibi son

Zamanlarda yaptığımız projelerde bu değişti ve insanların da ilgisini çekti. Bize bu değişimi soruyorlar.

ŞY: bir çok sosyal konut projesi deneyiminiz var. Sosyal konut bugün kentsel planlamanın önemli bir başlığı. WoZoCo’dan Mirador’a bu deneyiminiz nasıl gelişti?

JVR: Aslında bu durum biraz değişiyor.

ŞY: İnsanlar aslında planlamanın en zayıf noktasının sosyal konutlar olduğunu düşünüyor. Siz WozoCo ve Mirador üzerinden ne söyleyebilirsiniz?

JVR: Mirador ve WozoCo birbirinden çok farklı bağlamlardı. Hollanda’aki sosyal konut politikaları epey değişti, İspanya’da ise başka bir sistem var. Sosyal konut projelerinde mimarlar çok özgürler çünkü emlak piyasasının koşulları onları bağlamıyor. Ne olursa olsun bu evler ya çok makul fiyatlara satılacak ya da kiralanacak. Geleneksel ev alım satımlarında yaşan beğeni krizi bu evlerde yaşanmıyor.Bu evlerde genel beğeni kıstaslarının önemi yok; ki bu kıstasların ne olduğuna dair de kimsenin bir fikri yok. Hep söylenen bir şey vardır; ‘insanlar bunu istiyor’, belki insanların % 60’ı bunu istiyor ama peki geri kalan % 40? Neyse WozoCo’ya geri dönecek olursak, WoZoCo tamamen sosyal konut olan bir proje oysa şu an yaptığımız konut projeleri daha karma, sadece sosyal konut değil. Mirador projesinde ise orada daha önce yapılmayan bir şey yapmamız istendi, konut üzerine tartışma yaratacak bir şey. Bu anlamda hedeflediğimizi başardık. Bir çok insan bu konutlar hakkında konuşuyor ama ilginç olan şu; bu evler satılık. Onları alan insanlar çok iyi fiyatlara alıyorlar. Mimari kalitesinden dolayı değil uygun fiyatlı olduğu için alıyorlar. Biz bu projeye başladığımızda bu detayları pek bilmiyorduk o nedenle spesifik evler tasarladık ama şu an mesela tek katlı bir dairede oturmak isteyen kadının mutsuz olduğunu görüyoruz çünkü dubleks bir dairede oturuyor. Eğer tek katlı daire için bekleseydi, 3 yıl beklemesi gerekecekti. WozoCo’da oturan ilk nesil mimarinin farkında değil finansal sebeplerle oradalar, ikinci neslin ise evleri bilinçli olarak mimarisi için de aldığını görüyoruz. Bu şekilde kullanıcı profilinin değişeceğini düşünüyorum. Daha sonra aynı müşteri için başka bir proje yaptık bu sefer daha nötr, daha yalın bir tasarıma gittik. Binanın bütünü çok ilgi çekici ama evler tek tek bakıldığında daha yalın ve genel beğeniye hitap ediyor. Bunu insanlar, yaşadıkları mekanlarla daha az sorun yaşasın diye yaptık. Bir sosyal konut projesini ne kadar deneysel yapabilirsiniz. Burada deneyselliği üreteceğiniz yerler yaşama alanları değil de daha ortak alanlar, kamusal mekanlar olmalı. Bir çok durumda insanlar yaşadıkları iç mekanların deneysel olmasını istemiyorlar. Tekil evlerde ise bunu isteyen ve talep eden bazı müşterilerle de karşılaşıyoruz. O zaman da bu spesifik mekanları orada yaşayan o insanlar için yaratıyoruz. 12 senelik tecrübemizde öğrendiğimiz şey bu.

ŞY: Özellikle Mirador projesine bakarak, kamusal alan sınırlarını ve tanımını değiştirdiğinizi, genişlettiğinizi, yeni bileşenlerle bütünleştirdiğinizi söyleyebilir miyiz?

JVR: İspanya’da aslında oldukça dışa dönük bir proje geliştirdik. Bu kentsel açıdan da önemli bir projeydi çünkü yüksekliği nedeniyle uzaktan görünüyordu. Orada yaratılan mekanları nasıl kullanacakları ise tamamen orada yaşayanlara bağlı. Büyük bir ihtimalle bazı insanlar kullanmak isteyeceklerdir, bazıları ise kullanmak istemeyeceklerdir. Oradaki kamusal alanlar oranın bir bonusu oradaki insanlara bağlı bir şey değil. Biz aslında o boşlukta bir oyun alanı yapmak istiyorduk ama kimse yapmaya yanaşmadı çünkü bütçeye dahil edilmemişti. Belediye de bunun onları ilgilendirmediğini söyleyince, vazgeçmek zorunda kaldık. Çünkü onların kontrolü olmayan bir yer olacaktı. Şu an Amsterdam’da yaptığımız projede farklı bir şey yaptık, bu alanları baştan bütçeye dahil ettik. Ortak alanlar için gerekli para baştan bütçeye dahil oldu.

ŞY:Sosyal konut projeleri, yaşama alanları, komşuluk birimi gibi konular söz konusu olunca, bir çok Hollandalı mimarda olduğu gibi sizde de bir Team 10 etkisi olduğunu hissediyorum.

JVR: Evet onlardan etkilendiğimiz doğru. Aslında bunun sebebi biraz da Delft’teki hocalarımız. Onlar Team 10’den çok etkilenmiş bir nesildi. Böyle dönem dönem farklı etkiler oluyor okullarda. Mesela OMA ve Rem Koolhaas da okulu çok etkilemiştir. Tabii sadece OMA veya Team 10 olduğunu söyleyemem, dışarıdaki humanist hareketlerden de ok etkilendik. Eğitim hayatımızın arka planında bunlar vardı.

ŞY: OMA’dan bahsetmişken OMA’nın MVRDV olma süreci üzerindeki etkisini sorabilir miyim? Win Maas ve siz OMA’da çalıştınız bir dönem.

JVR: OMA hem Hollanda içinde hem de Hollanda’nın dışında çok etkileri olan bir oluşum oldu. OMA’nın getirdiği yeni bir kavramsal yaklaşımdı. Onlarınki bir çalışma metodolojisi. Bizim orada öğrendiğimiz şey bu oldu. Ama bütününde Oma çok büyük bir ofis, insanlar geliyor ve gidiyor. Şu anda çok da bağımız kalmadı çünkü bizim zamanımızdan tamamen farklı insanlar çalışıyor.

ŞY: Küçükçekmece için yaptığını yarışma projesini nasıl kurguladınız? Projede dikkate aldığınız şeyler, nelerdi?

JVR: Bu bizim o bölge için çok önemli bulduğumuz bir öneriydi, özellikle de kıyı şeridi açısından. Çok özel bir nokta. Biz kıyıyı ulaşılabilir, herkesin kullanabileceği bir alana dönüştürmek istedik. Kıyının rotasını tekrar çizmek gibi. Küçükçekmece’de çok yoğun bir yerleşim dokusu var, onu biraz hafifletmek, yeşillendirmek istedik. O bölgenin kendine has özelliklerini, oraya geri döndürebilecek farklı bir yaklaşım oluşturduk. Örneğin o bölgede kaç tane plaj olduğunu saydık ve daha fazlasına ihtiyaç olduğunu gördük. İstanbul suyla iç içe bir şehir ama Barselona veya Los Angeles ile kıyaslandığında suyu çok az kullanıyor. Biz bu anlamda denizi biraz daha şehrin içerisine soktuk. Önerimizde ayrıca bir marina da vardı, tüm bu tuzlu-tatlı su sistemi, marina o nokta için bir stratejiydi. Sonucu stresli de olsa üzerinde düşünülmüş, karmaşık ve ilginç bir projeydi. Bugün baktığımda arkasındaki kurgunun ve düşüncenin hala sağlam olduğunu düşünüyorum. Tabii şu an yapabileceği tek şey, seçilmediği için, başka insanlara ilham vermek. (Gülüyor

)

Ömer Kanıpak: Bu proje bölgesinin problemli bir tarafı var çünkü aslında orada bir alt merkez yaratılmak isteniyordu ama kazanan projenin böyle bir potansiyel yaratma gücü olduğunu düşünmüyorum.

JVR: Bence orada yapılacak projede erişilebilirliği, bölgenin doğal güzellikleriyle birleştirmek lazım. Haftasonları insanların arabalarıyla çevresinde dolaşabilecekleri, kamusal erişime açık bir alan. Aynı zamanda ekolojik ve doğal olarak da oldukça ilginç bir yere dönüşebilir. Bunların birbirlerini dışlamaları gerektiğini düşünmüyorum.

ÖK: jürinin oraya koyduğunuz otel bloğuyla ilgili bir tartışması oldu değil mi?

JVR: Evet ama ana proje oraya yapılan otel değil ki o sadece bir bina. Eğer bunun yüzünden seçmedilerse, seçim kriterlerinde büyük bir yanlışlık var demek ki. Temelde bu bir kentsel tasarım projesiydi ama bazı binaların da tasarlanmasını istediler. Tamam bu hoş bir başlangıç olabilir ama sonuçta seçim oradaki mimari üsluba bağlı olmamalı çünkü bu bir kentsel düşünce üretme projesiydi biz orada kentsel bir gelişim stratejisi ürettik. Marinanın mimarisi değil de konumu çok önemli, bu tip kararlar mimari beğeni kıstaslarıyla verilmemeli.

ŞY: İç mekanlara karşı ilginç bir yaklaşımınız var. Mekanları adapte edilmesi için esnek bırakıyorsunuz. Kontrolü kaybetmek ve kullanıcıya devretmek konusunda bir probleminiz yok sanırım?

JVR: Ah evet, sanırım böyle söyleyebiliriz. Buna iç mekanların kolonileştirilmesi de diyebiliriz, insanların özelleştirme biçimleri. Her şeyi önceden tanımlamak ve belirlemek yerine, bir sistem kurup onun kendi kendine gelişmesini izlemek. Ama tabii bunu her projemizde yapmıyoruz. Birkaç sene önce NAI’de bir sergimiz vardı; Endless Interiors of MVRDV diye.

ŞY: O sergiyi görmüştüm biraz da onunla ilgili bu soru.

JVR.: Evet işte oradaki düşüncelerden biriydi bu ama her proje kendine özel bir tecrübedir. Belli projelerde bu kolonileştirme oluyor.

ŞY: O projeleri belli yapan ne sizin için?

JVR: Sanırım tecrübenin bütünü ve mekansal algı.

ŞY: Hangi projenizin buna en iyi örnek olduğunu düşünüyorsunuz, kontrolünüzden çıkan ama çıkışın hoşunuza gittiği bir proje?

JVR:

Bence Vpro buna gerçekten de iyi bir örnek çünkü o binada çalışan ve sürekli olarak orayı dönüştüren çılgın bir insan grubu var. Her şey o kadar hızlı değişiyor ki Vpro’da. Bina tüm arkitektoniği ve katılığına rağmen iç mekanlar değişken. İki sene sonra gittiğinizde her şeyin değiştiğini görüyorsunuz. Bazen bu hoşunuza gidiyor, bazense gitmiyor. Ama binanın kendi kalitesi sağlam olduğu için bu iç mekanların değişkenliği yapının tümünü etkilemiyor.

ŞY: MVRDV olarak yadığınız yazılarda kendinize sorduğunuz bir çok soru var bunlardan biri de yoğunluk ile ilgili. Ben de size sormak istiyorum, daha çok yoğunluk daha iyi ve içerik olarak zengin şehirler mi demek?

JRV: Bence öyle. Düdüklü tencere benzetmesi yaparak ve ona dayanarak çoğunlukla bunun doğru olduğunu söyleyebilirim. Yoğunluk, sosyal olarak dinamik alanlara sebep oluyor. Dünya üzerindeki bir çok yoğun bölge aynı zamanda da çok enerjik ve iyi. Mesela bana birkaç yoğun kent ismi verin.

ŞY: Tokyo, Mexico City, Sao Paolo..

JVR: Hepsi harika şehirler(Gülüyor). Bence kaçış noktaların ve sübapların olduğu sürece kentsel yoğunluk çok çekici bir kavram. Ama dediğim gibi kaçabileceğiniz nefes alma noktalarının, dağın, yeşilin olması gerek.İşte o zaman harika yaşam alanları oluşuyor. Bilmiyorum belki de benim bunu bu kadar çekici bulmamın sebebi Hollandalı olmamdır. Hollanda bu anlamda o kadar homojen ki biz bunu çekici buluyoruz. Örneğin bizim büyük kentlerimiz, dünyadaki diğer büyük kentler göz önüne alındığında oldukça küçük kaçıyor. Bizde bir çok orta büyüklükte şehir var ve bunların arasındaki alanlar çok küçük, çok klostrofobik.Biz de bu yüzden yoğunluğu yüksek, açık alanları çok geniş olan tasarımları tercih ediyoruz.

Ömer Kanıpak: Peki sizce, yoğun şehirleri daha yaşanılır kılarsak banliyöler yok olur mu?

JVR: Hayır bence her zaman farklı tercihler bir arada olacaktır. Herkes farklı tercihler yapmaya devam edecektir. Ama tabii ki yoğunluğu düşünürken, yoğun olmayan bölgelerin yaşam koşullarını da iyileştirmeyi düşünmeliyiz. Ulaşım gibi sorunları.

ŞY: Ütopyalar için ne düşünüyorsunuz? Mesela Archigram’ın metinleri veya Thomas Moore gibi yazarların tariflediği ütopya kentleri hakkında?

JVR: Evet biz bu tür eserleri her zaman ilginç bulduk ama her şeyde olduğu gibi bu eserleri de bire bir almak veya yorumlamadan kabul etmek çok yanlış.Ama gene de tabii ki bunlardan etkilenip, ilham alıyoruz.

ŞY: MVRDV yakın zamanda yeni bir kitap yapacak mı?

JVR: Hemen değil. Birkaç sene içinde olabilir ancak çünkü son kitabımız Game ^yi yapmak epey zamanımızı ve enerjimizi aldı.

ŞY: Şu aralar ne tip projelerle ilgileniyorsunuz? Nasıl projeler yapmak istersiniz?

JVR: Maalesef her zaman seçim şansımız olmuyorç Hollanda dışında çok projemiz var şu an. İlginçtir ki biz Hollanda dışında daha çok tanınıyor, daha kolay iş alıyoruz. Europan ile yaptığımız iyi başlangıç ve sonrasında Hollanda’da iyi işler yaptık ama artık alıştılar ve gene mi MVRDV diyorlar bazen. (Gülüyor)Şu anda Avrupa’nın çeşitli yerlerinde, Almanya, Fransa, İskandinav ülkelerinde projelerimiz var. İstanbul da çok çekici, çok enerjik ve ilginç, mimarlar burada olmak ister.

ŞY: Röportaj için teşekkür ederim.

JVR: Ben teşekkür ederim.

research on informality

2004-11-15T13:50:00.001+02:00

[k]NOT of the other?
“…The existence of antagonisms is the very condition of a free society. This is because antagonism results from the fact that the social is not a plurality of effects radiating from a pre-given centre, but is pragmatically constructed from many starting points.”[1]
“Displacement is a condition; it generates a discursive chain of actions and counteractions motivated by improvisation, intuition, risk and creative laps. [2]

The contemporary nature of the “developing” city is one of volatile plurality, informality, fusion and confusion. While the traditional nature of an urban environment is idealized as one of opportunity, access to services and wealth, the making of contemporary “developing” city is constructed through radical contestation in the course of continuous appropriation and re-appropriation often played out in public space.

This paper argues that the making of the contemporary “developing” city is not only an intrinsic reaction to the post-colonial discourse of displacement (where the idea of the developing city is often based on naturalized myths of homogeneous identities conformed to and informed by colonial discourse), but that informality or the condition of displacement is a retroactive process that is outside the realm of control of people.

We hypothesise that the “other" (“the other”: migrants, socially excluded) are cognisant and active space makers who enjoy power to consciously control and dynamically manipulate their environment rather than being passive to forces of displacement, a kind of self-organisation in a chaotic structure. In public spaces where this encounter of two, three or more parties hold great importance in shaping the space, the spontaneous formations and informality results in unexpected urban dialogues and appropriated ways that re-organize spaces, traces and information that urbanism espouses.

This presentation will attempt to prove the hypothesis through an urban exploration of “developing” cities that span four continents. The methodology entails an investigation into the making of public space in these cities through a collaboration of architects living within them. We will investigate the character of these places, the appropriation of the space by the “others” and how this is reflected upon form and spatial relations (the expanded – shrinking – itinerant – modes of architectures).

The choice of the cities is an eclectic manifestation of the diverse milieu of radical ultra-urbanism and represents divergent contexts that provide evidence of spatial agency through perceived informal action.These spaces are bewildering public places of flux and contestation in which there is an ongoing process for reconstruction and reclamation.

a grand square in the centre of Cape Town,
from a former black market to a hybrid public space in the centre of Lima,
an “informal informational” public space in Istanbul,
and the frog game in the squatter settlements - periphery of Bogotá

Cape Town, South Africa

The Grand Parade: the off-centre centre.

Lima, Peru
Alameda Chabuca Granda

A backyard space, an undefined void, a contrast between the “official” and “non- official”. Such characters are constant in housing in Lima, and sometimes translated into public spaces. In contrast to the main square, the Alameda[3] Chabuca Granda stands as one of the latest, having a strategic location, within the Historical Centre: right behind San Francisco Convent, besides the Government Palace, next to the Rimac River, and to the bridge that connects Cercado de Lima and Rimac districts. It is also the back entrance of a majority of population to the Historical Centre, since in the other side of the bridge a bus stop of the Panamerican Highway exists, connecting most of the city.

For the last decades, it has suffered many transformations influenced by political decisions. During the 70’s an enormous platform of concrete was built, destined for parking space, both on top and underneath. It became an empty no-man’s land. During the 80’s, and with the proliferation of thousands of street migrant vendors in the Historical Centre, this space was conceded to them in order to “legalize” their situation. Polvos Azules became the main and biggest flea black market of the city. Just a few meters away from the Government Palace, one could find any type of contraband products like electrical equipment, pirate movies and music, fake clothes of international brands such as Nike, Reebok, etc.

During the first administration (1996-1999) of mayor Alberto Andrade, these vendors were relocated in the outskirts of the Historical Centre, with the intention to give the space a public use. The construction of the new promenade began in August 1998. The space was projected for both local scale use -mostly for inhabitants of the Cercado and Rimac districts, connecting both sides of the river-. Still, the project has a metropolitan scale. Commissioned to young architect Javier Artadi, it was given total trust to act freely in the project’s program and the design. Taking into account the urban impact of this intervention, the solution promoted a strong social interaction that reinforced the each time bigger identification of the limeños with their Historical Centre.[4]

The promenade includes a series of preconceived urban elements: amphitheatres, pergolas, and some other of spontaneous use, such as spheres and cubes, distributed along a platform. We human beings have a predicted and unpredicted behaviour towards objects. A staircase is used to go up and down, and why not then to sit on the staircases and have a drink. This is how a new universe opens to understand that what we should do is create spaces that allow a proliferation of no predicted spaces, and not limit ourselves to the small square with the little benches that have a complete predicted use… The human being tends to appropriate spaces, it has an infantile programme that activates even if the person is too serious. Chabuca Granda combines these predicted and unpredicted uses, which makes its social value multiply… If you ask people what the use is meant for, they will answer they don’t know, but children are there, inventing games….The strength of this project eradicates in that even when it is a purely geometric and minimalist architecture, it´s loaded with social strength, because the geometry is not the end, it is placed in such a way that the event is the people itself, and this is what public projects should be.

The centrepiece of the Alameda is an imposing steel sculpture of 9 mts[5]. The stylized image of a woman dancing marinera[6], is a remembrance to Chabuca Granda, famous ballad Peruvian composer. The urban equipment is conformed by a large number of light posts, trash bins and benches.

Nowadays, and since the election of the new mayor, the space is suffering a new transformation. A new flea market, authorized by the city hall is installed for a period of 20 days each month. The space has been sub-divided in two spaces, a conformed one and the remains of the other. Chinese items, medicine plants, handicrafts, books, and some “chicha” music stands dominate the space. The marinera dancer is still the centre of the space, but now at her feet a DJ is installed, playing chicha, salsa and huaynos giving more “ambience” to the space.

Whose space is this? A public space? An empty void? A space with authentic commercial vocation? Why can’t it find its own definition? Or as intended now, are the authorities meant to give the space a definition or should the people find its own? And then which people?

Istanbul, Turkey

THE INFORMAL INFORMATIONAL SPACE

-Would you like to glance at our CDs sister?

Located just across the ferry terminals carrying thousands of people every day, close to the train station which is the doorstep of Istanbul for hundreds of immigrants arriving from different parts of Anatolia and with its bustling bus and minibus stops, Kadikoy pier is just an example of how the word flux could come into being. One of the busiest districts in Istanbul, a transitional space for the white collars early in the morning and evening, a cruising arena for young immigrants from the inner parts of Anatolia, this place gives you a constant feeling of escape. This transitional nature of the space is also reflected in the interaction of various economical activities, that take place within this sphere of the pier area. Serving to sustain the continuity of this flux, these activities take the turn over from eachother during the day and night.

The urban blocks facing the pier on the other side of the road, are dense as well. Housing either offices or hotels, these districts are not very convenient to lead a tranquille life desired by a middle-class family. Because of its proximity to important modes of transportation, these are desirable neighborhoods for low-budget students or foreigners.

Amid this turmoil, the blocks take a visible break in its continuity. This time another kind of chaos, different than of the hectic schedule runners is observed. The actors of this chaotic scenery are, the informal representatives of small CD shops, selling unlicensed programs or movies and confused crowd of spectators diverted or about to be diverted from their actual reason of presence there. There is a constant movement both outside and inside the buildings. This informal public space is formed by the gap between two consecutive urban blocks, taking shape as a small square and streching into the inner parts of the block. The mecca of this area is one building operating as a small IT shopping center. The chaos radiate from this center to the neighboring streets and shops.

Yazıcıoglu, which is the name of the building, has also rooted as a symbol for all the trade activities concerning IT for the Asian part of İstanbul. Before the consumption patterns in IT industry has arrived, Yazicioglu used to be the home for shops selling electronical devices. By time this has been predominantly replaced by IT and computer industry. This has also coincided with an urban reality, the unskilled immigrant labor, namely the ‘other’ .

The building is at the beginning of a passage-like street which is surrounded by hardware dealers, shops and peddlers. When it ends on the pier side, Yazicioglu is visible. This trade activity inside the building has overflown to the street. Young immigrant men and sometimes children sell unlicensed computer programmes and movies. Once they used to have boxes or trays where they displayed the CD’s .Then these were removed by the municipal police because of their illegal content. But this has not terminated the trade there, now these immigrant men with their regional dialects, not fully being aware of the content they are selling, come along to the passers by and ask the famous question: ‘Would you like to glance at our CD’s?’

This trade process has entirely become dependent on verbal communication. Once the customer is convinced, s/he is taken to an underground shop to buy the CD. This change in the nature of the trade has resulted in use of every inch of the outdoor spaces and continous mobility. The police, who is a complice in this activity, is still around pretending to control the area. The pedestrian street in front of Yazicioglu building is being used for cruising and selling by the verbal sellers and customers. Several benches were placed on the street and small fast-food restaurants, facing this square-like space has opened. Overwhelmed by this constant activity, the interior of the building works like a communal space as well. Youngsters hanging out in each floor infront of the shops and spending hours both inside and outside the building, shop owners communicating through the atrium inside the building. This flow continues at nights with another kind of display, boxes of CDs having adult content are carefully set and the physical space is reorganized.

Yazicioglu is an important example of appropriated space driven by economical motives and global consumption patterns. The main activity radiating from the focus, flowing into the streets, dissolving borders of what is inside and what is outside. A consumption frenzy coupling up with displaced, ignored ‘other’.

THE PERIPHERY - EL JUEGO DE LA RANA –THE GAME OF THE FROG-
Bogotá, Colombia

What are the features of the periphery? What if we decompose it´s complexity by saying it´s a landscape in transition where the legibility of it´s structure can decode oppositions that nurture the desires of people in the city to construct and redefine space. Emptiness-saturation, noise-silence, order-dis-order, heterochrony-synchrony are dichotomies immersed in those cultural practices of a specific displaced afrocolombian community, that as “the other”, relocates a tradition that ‘bricollages’ space.

Play the game…
Saturday, 2 pm. Squattered settlements-Cázuca-Bogotá. Pedestrians passing by a place that releases a subtle sound of vallenato –traditional bandoneón and percussion Colombian music- the smell of beer, the clicking sound of metal rings of the game uncovers an environment of amusement. Pedestrians passing by might continue their journey; others might stay to watch. The target: One wooden box, 1.2 mts. high, some holes along the vertical front side of the box and a metal frog on top, with it’s mouth wide opened. Bet money, or even for no special prize, enjoy your time: earn points standing 2mts away from the box and try getting some metal rings into the frog’s mouth, try to get one of the metal pieces inside the holes.

For locals, the game is played indoors, but the displaced, practice this game in their home villages on the streets. In Bogotá, people seen in this street are mostly afro-pacific people that pass by, and during the day, the street will be a path for encounters between neighbours. But when men meet at a small shop, an encounter between locals and afro-pacific community shows the reconstruction of the game’s imaginary for the displaced community. The possibility of having “others” intervene in the game as actors-spectators, and the lack of definition of the infrastructure of the street –no sidewalks, unpaved streets- provokes informal actions, tensions made by objects placed in a certain spot of public space.

A street in this urban fabric has a steep topography and a multifunctional character with main commercial services; this is the setting for the juego de la rana. Exteriorizing this game in the street catches attention of diverse communities calling to stop, change their flows for a moment and become part of the audience, shifting the border between the ones that are moving and the ones that pause. In terms of architecture, informal housing is the only physical limit between the private realm from the outside, the congested space of encounter, the street itself. Absence of physical boundaries between the street’s flow and the space for the game inspires crossing other borders –the noise, the linearity, the exclamations, the music in the ritual-. The existence of space is related to the event of playing, to the presence of itinerant objects on the spot, rather than any attempts defined by architectural or public space types. Chaos and confusion reveal spontaneous mutation and accommodation of a given flexible, blured structure. A transformation of a non place uncovers anonymity into the public scenery, and displaced make a temporal rupture in the homogeneous dynamic of the street.

Here is an ephemeral space: once the game is over, the box goes back inside the shop and the dynamics of the space turn back again into that landscape of mobility. In the wide opening street, there is no revealed identity of one main character; all play mimicry in the dust of the street and there is no specific event which sets up the scenery to identify themselves by the presence of others. This is just an example of diverse activities and nodes developed in the borders of that heterogeneous periphery. There´s a valuable potential of creativity in a relatively uncontrolled sprawl in the city. The absence of legislation and control leads to a transposition of orders, spontaneously done by the people in need of propinquity and signifiers in the periphery; it gives space the capacity to transform having different temporal formal stages. It makes that anonymity that displaced protect with, become a tool to negotiate difference. Appropriation of space is made even by the smallest objects and creative bricollaged designs inducing an encounter. Such improvisation and newness bring people together into these interstices, in between conditions, to build collective urban memory in spite of social, or cultural difference.

CONCLUSIONS

From historical urban nodes, through transitional places, to ephemeral temporary interventions, the impact of informality varies widely in this exercise. Within multiple structures, we go from sharp urban representations towards globalization, to more controlled spaces immersed in political and social relationships. The actors of this spatial construction process, named as the ‘other’, are outside forces bringing in these fluxes. Yet they are the ones taking on the responsibilities of risks and ensure the reorganization of fixed uses of spaces. The process of displacement engages them in the city as the cognisant space-makers.
Given the reality of occupation, each space reflects motives for reconstruction and reclamation nurtured by different aspirations.It can be economical or cultural. It can be born from the need to enact certain cultural rituals or to survive and reconstruct a new identity.

The four presentations offered uses tools for reading the landscape that are diverse and idiosyncratic. It remains undisputable though that the displaced are far from being victims of circumstance but are in fact powerful actors in urban arenas ranging from the centre of the city to its periphery. The reflections display a very real ability of those considered to be beyond space making as in fact being rather creative and ingenious place and space makers.

The overriding characteristic of the other’s ability to make space is in its unparalleled inventiveness, ingenuity and malleable ability to transform and contort to prevailing force fields. The occupied space is filled with numerous seemingly discrete decisions and computations that results in unpredictability translated into patterns of amoeboid space. The middle-ground thus becomes the playground of spatial imagination.

In each of the case studies presented, rather than utilitarian space representing a dearth of space it is inventively and interactively translated and filled with vibrant meaning and potency. It is in the interstitial space where real culture is negotiated that opens up the world of urbanism and space making to those other than individuals with political and socio-economic means. It is in the in-between that the other finds space and the opportunity to express their identity. It is the middle-ground that makes space for the other to express its making of space.

Rather than being subservient to or subjugated by planning decisions made by those with and in power, the other is a vibrant and active participant in ordering and managing the public spatial realm from the bottom up.

Bibliography

Bhabha, Homi. Locations of Culture. Routledge, London, 1994.

Bhabha, Homi. "The Third Space." Rutherford, Jonathan ed. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990.

Heynen, Hilde Loeckx, Andre. "Scenes of Ambivalence, Concluding remarks on Architectural Patterns of Displacement", in: Shih-Wei Lo and others, "Patterns of displacement" (part II), in: Journal of Architectural Education, Nov. 1998, pp. 100-108.
Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael. “Alien Relationships from Public Space”, in: Transurbanism. V2_Publishing/NAI Publishers, Rotterdam, 2002, pp136.
Levi Strauss, Claude. “La ciencia de lo concreto”, in: El Pensamiento Salvaje. Fondo Cultura Económica, Breviarios, México, 1964, pgs. 42-43

Said, Edward W.Orientalism. Vintage Books, New York, 1979

[1] Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael. “Alien Relationships from Public Space”, in: Transurbanism. V2_Publishing/NAI Publishers, Rotterdam, 2002, pp136
[2] Heynen, Hilde Loeckx, Andre. "Scenes of Ambivalence, Concluding remarks on Architectural Patterns of Displacement", in: Shih-Wei Lo and others, "Patterns of displacement" (part II), in: Journal of Architectural Education, Nov. 1998, pp. 101
[3] Avenue, Public Walk, Promenade
[4] Alberto Gil Espino, “La Alameda Chabuca Granda (mas cultura para la capital)”, Revista Espacio, Nov-Dec 1998, Year 21, No. 42, pp. 46-51. Lima, Perú.
[5] Created by Peruvian artist Rhony Allhalel, the figure is modelled on the famous cut-out figures of French artist Henri Matisse.
[6] Typical dance from the coast, there are two versions: one from the north coast called marinera norteña, and one from Lima more stylized. Chabuca Granda composed some of these last one.
k[not]

new research on public space

2004-11-15T13:15:00.000+02:00

excited about our new project...

a nice and strong colloboration amon 4 architects from Istanbul, Cape Town, Lima and Bogota is on the way..The argument is strong and the case studies are well chosen..after january i will probably publish the introduction of the work here in my blog.
i can only give the name for now; k[not] of the other

Short Bio

2004-11-04T17:15:00.001+02:00

Şevin Yıldız is an architect, editor and writer. Graduated from Istanbul Technical University and later on KULeuven Belgium, she now conducts her research and teaching at New Jersey Institute of Technology in USA. Apart from her architectural practice, she was the editor of Betonart Magazine and worked as the local director of the City Projects of Istanbul in Venice Architecture Biennale in 2006. She takes parts in collaborative projects like StudyoKahem in 10^th Istanbul Art Biennale or the exhibition House: A Settlement Negotiation. She was also part of the Night School Program in New Museum,NY (2008-9).

welcome on board

2004-11-03T23:33:00.000+02:00

for the first post of my webpage, i would say 'welcome on board'.