01. Worm’s Eye View From Inside the Mountain

The cut / site organization

Our main organizational intervention is a 15-meter-high incision, which, at higher and lower altitudes, leaves the ground in its own flow, while transforming the intermediate levels into a plane where we can intervene through field techniques. This cut still enables us to emphasize and/or reveal the disappearing contours of the existing topography.

The cut yields a single plane and a total volume. While, the spaces carved out of the topography take the form of a quarry that is supported by reinforced concrete vaulting, the leveled and exposed ground is to be covered by a light-weight envelope that can dissolve and/or become permeable at various locations, as these locations would be equipped with their own micro climate control systems.

02. The Cut / Site Organization Diagrams (illustrated by Eda Yeyman&Derya Uzal)

Cosmography and architectural imagination

03. States of Anxiety (illustratesd by Onur Demir)
05.States of Anxiety (illustratesd by Onur Demir)
04.States of Anxiety (illustratesd by Onur Demir)
06.
06. States of Being a Cemetery (illustratesd by Onur Demir)

We propose an architectural image for envisioning the infrastructures, possibilities, climates, and atmospheres of institutions, organizations, animals, realms of meaning, ecosystems, machines, and calculations, with an emphasis on their interactions and events. We attempt at developing ways in which these formations could be inter-stratified to form a space of experimentation.

Since it deals with the incomplete, ambiguous, and inexhaustible, this is an architecture that refuses to be defined through site or volume boundaries; while it could still be detected in its local interactions. We consider it improbable to arrive at such an architecture through totalizing concepts such as form, integrity, completeness, harmony, or homogeneity that target a reductive individuality for buildings.

Our quest for reconsidering the causal structure of architecture guides us into a spatial and architectural image that tends to find its expression as an interscalar / transscalar texture. We would like to understand this causal structure not only with regard to the usual factors like economy, public relations, function, efficiency, and architectural culture, but—while taking these for granted- also with regard to cosmic fields, waves, and subatomic particles; stable systems established by the interactions of these particles; living things that are constituted and maintained by such stable systems; higher order organizations based on living things; institutions as a variant of organizations; strictly ordered machines and calculation; scientific perspectives that frame the encounters of paradigmatic setups with the manifestations of reality; and the senses and concerns that appear and subsist in the immaterial conceptual spaces of mental commonalities.

The manifestation of such an architecture is not various inside-out autonomous becomings or meaningful formations as some suggest, but a vertical inter-stratification in terms of a multitude of scales. As a consequence, an architecture that seeks its causes and reasons in a multi-scalar cosmological interpretation must go beyond traditional representations such as plans and sections, and build its new image in the form of a cosmography that spans and samples both micro and macro scales.

Architecture has to leave aside the completeness and refinement of tectonic setups, go beyond a strict search for efficiency that loses its possibilities while solving problems, and anticipate the signs and residues of constructive events and their efficiency, only as other layers of systemic interactions and linkages of events.

07. States of Anxiety (illustratesd by Onur Demir)

08. States of Night (illustratesd by Onur Demir)

09. States of Anxiety (illustratesd by Onur Demir)

Programs, Layers, and Fields

The critical layers that we have sampled from within the plural constitution of the university, reveal the need for a reinterpretation of the intricate relationship of the university organization with space. Organization, institution, records, communication, and management layers emerge as idiosyncratic spaces that may not always map onto four-dimensional space-time. While the management layer carries the information flows to the electronic environment, the decisions and indecisions that appear at the negotiation tables freely traverse the architectural program.

The loosened spatial coordinates of the institutional and university organization calls the constitution of the architectural program over faculties, administrative units, and service areas into question.

Transforming the categorial schema of the given program, which is mapped onto the institutional organigram, towards new commonalities and divergences, enables us to envision the space as a multiplicity of fields that allow programmatic overlaps, multiple temporal programmings, and the interaction and dynamic stratification of events. At the same time, in an attempt to maximize flexibility and efficiency, it makes it possible to explore the possibility of a pluralist reductionism.

The layers that need to be re-addressed, with respect to the new programmatic commonalities that we set forth are: 1) events and areas of learning and communication, 2) administration-organization-office areas, 3) bodily activity and catering / service areas, 4) laboratories, 5) archive and storage areas. The exigency of these areas depends on the physiology of animal bodies and minds, rather than the institution itself.

Our revisions in the architectural program have been mapped into our spatial strategies, which have evolved as a catalog of field and infrastructure architectures. Necessary facilities for the realization of the events envisaged by the program are distributed over the campus plane through field strategies. A minimal set of moving objects is a second reductionist intervention that allows us to treat the entire program within the logic of industrial production that is based on strict repetition; and in fact, fully corresponds to the current trends in university administration. On the other hand, the locations and boundaries of this minimal and repetitive set have not been pre-determined, and their potentially dynamic distribution patterns have been kept open to the possibility of a pluralist space.

The micro-acclimatization and mobile furniture sets that support education-learning-communication areas enable the creation of space patterns without pre-determined groupings and boundaries between faculties, while offering a basis where faculty areas can be set up and/or changed if desired.

Administrative units and offices are similarly provided with a reduced set of facilities or means. Laboratories that demand specialized equipment and conditions are again met with our field strategies, that is, with tactics towards the distribution of means, through an infrastructural logic similar to logistical areas like archives and storage that potentially allows automation.

Thus, an architectural image becomes clear, where borders loose importance, envelopes 'flex and become permeable' in favor of 'soft transitions', the interior and exterior create zones of indiscernibility through 'infiltrations', and where 'designed incompleteness' encourages 'unpredictable encounters' and 'programmatic hybridizations'.

09. Diagram of Programs, Layers, and Fields (illustratesd by Naz Nar)