The Pluralist-Inter Stratification of What Simply Continues
İzmir University of Economics Güzelbahce Campus National Architectural Design Competition (2022)
Purchase Prize
İnsandışıThe Unhuman Collective
Team:
Nizam Onur Sönmez, Derya Uzal, Eda Yeyman, M.Kaan Alptekin, M.Sait Aktay, Arin Aydin, Naz Nar
01. Worm’s Eye View From Inside the Mountain
The cut / site organization
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)
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)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.
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'.
11. Drawing/ Working Environment (illustrated by Eda Yeyman&Derya Uzal)
Since our spatial strategies weaken the need for spatial formations and narratives with well-delineated boundaries and/or precise formal definitions; the totalistic, well-circumscribed, and finished narratives imposed by the traditional representation packages are no longer relevant or necessary.
A slice taken from the campus plane is simply mapped onto the drawing board. The '90 degree axonometric' is chosen as the basic drawing strategy, which makes it possible to superpose top and front views, enabling the simultaneity of partial plans, elevations, and sections.
Our reductionist framework, inspired by the traditions of modernism, in their orientation towards industrial repetition, simplicity, and infrastructure-oriented field architectures, can provoke a fear of monotony or homogeneity, which is indeed unfounded. That is because, the layers that envision a distribution of micro-climates, dynamic gradients of illumination, and “the cyborg greenhouse” make each location within the site unique, in terms of atmospheres and events. Our reductionist and forceful main decisions constitute a background that balances the otherwise widely enabled complexities.
The cyborg greenhouse is the collective name for a series of partially-living layers spanning all parts of the 'living campus'. The attempt to elaborate micro-macro connections by diversifying plant-fungus-micro-organism-climate-infrastructure-machine-computing connections, in a way to create cyborg setups at different scales and extents, should be read in relation to the search for 'a technology affecting education' and 'prospective potential transformations of spaces'.
Existing trees that are preserved in their exact locations to remind the lost trace of the given topography, together with the aeroponic infrastructure devised to keep them alive, biological treatment systems to be constructed along the geological fault line, the stream bed and the other preserved parts of the existing vegetation are other variations in the gradient of organization vs. spontaneity that underlies the cyborg greenhouse.
The potential of these layers to traverse, visualize, experiment with, and question the connections between all layers, from the subatomic world to micro-organisms and from machines to ecosystems, is aimed at supporting, on the one hand, the ‘research infrastructure’ of the university, and the ‘sensitivity’ of students who will be ‘the team players of environmental systems’, on the other.
12. Field Strategies (illustrated by Eda Yeyman&Derya Uzal)
Geography of meanings
Layers related to culture, mind, or various media, which are the matrix of 'critical thinking and emotional intelligence', draw parallels with the constitution of university, which is treated as a picture of reality.
While semantic, sensory or intellectual dimensions reveal their own spaces as fields; they mobilize a multitude of meanings as components of a pluralist cosmology, that focuses on themes such as dreams and concerns, advertisements and principles, scientific perspectives and stories.
In the 'universal future' that is to be 'foreseen', we are faced with a complex of stratifications that is plural and abyssal, uncertain and loose; rather than operating through dualisms or hierarchies.
It is hoped that this new world picture, in which the ecosystemic stratifications impose themselves, will be reflected in the organization of the academy, which is supposed to represent the world, albeit loosely. During the production of the 'universal, flexible, pluralistic, collaborative, transparent, and universal knowledge', science and the world will be mapped onto each other, while the university will move on to correspond to given organizational formations.
Although the universe enters the frame of science from the subatomic level, this does not provide sufficient reason to assign a lower bound or a beginning to the universe. While all the strata of reality (for which, different scientific fields, such as, Physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, mathematics, etc. offer perspectives) continue to establish complex interactions that violate hierarchies of scale, the temporality of subatomic particles, or the vertical / inside-out un/infolding dynamics that open onto genetic and/or generic dimensions, did not assume the kind of creative grounds or virtual unifications that philosophies of nature traditionally aspired to (cf. vitalism and philosophies of nature).
When all grounds of meaning that systematize, integrate, center, or assure cease to exist, what is complex and chaotic start to be attested everywhere, side by side and as intertwined with what gives order, calculates, or mechanizes—far from being opposed to them: traditional oppositions such as, order-chaos and mechanism-vitalism are left behind.
In this new and daring age, micro-organisms, fungi, plants, animals, societies, and institutions sustain socio-natural ecosystems. While the traditional cosmogonies, in which creation is opposed to inertia or flow, and calculation to the limitless, move away hand in hand with the impossibility of ideals, it will no longer be possible to talk about the obligatory complementarity of non-existent opposites. What remains is a dirty, impure, and inexhaustible universe-image, in which meaning appears and disappears only momentarily.
When nothing is missing, when things just go on, when architecture reproduces this world, does it mean that nothing has happened? Together with its 'students who have adapted to the economy and culture of the new century', the university will make a rich life possible with a highly functional and economical administrative and spatial setup. In a way, nothing has changed: the university is not freer, the administrations are not more open-minded or innovative, nor are university visions less stereotypical.
On the other hand, in this simply ongoing world, some minor quirks stand out. Even if there is no remarkable renewal in the universe, in a way everything looks new. Even though it is as if nothing has happened, it still seems as if something has happened.
18. Cyborg Greenhouse and Spatial Investigation (illustrated by M.Sait Aktay and Onur Demir)
23. Aeroponic
Plant Protection System
Plant Protection System
For example, as we explained above, in this age, living things and systems have ceased to become and buildings have quit formation. Due to the slowness of the current stage of evolution, the stability of the planet that makes life possible, and the functioning of the human mind and autonomous institutions, all systems emerge in their advanced forms and are dedicated to maintaining their homeostasis by delaying an inevitable process of dissolution. Nothing happens, everything is sustainable (cf. Simondon).
24. Plight-Emitting Algae and Billboard States (illustrated by Arın Aydın And Naz Nar)
Spontaneity has been severed from nature, in order to become the attribute of institutions, organizations, and systems that gained their own naturalness. Governance is a meaningful word now, and it imposes its manner of operation. By reinforcing its artificiality with what was natural, the institution gains a fully hybrid character, and declares its sovereignty (cf. social contract).
Although viruses continue to multiply, bacteria continue to divide, plants continue to grow and bloom, and species calmly go on to evolve, the space that corresponds to the above-described loose partiality of meaning, can at best be sought in the traditions of field architectures, which succeeds in providing organization even in the absence of information and reasons. In architectural fields, form-finding is instantaneous, meaning partial, causes incomplete, information temporal, manifestations interactive (cf. becoming and morphogenesis/formation).
27. University Environment (illustrated by Arın Aydın)
In this world, morals, politics, art, emotions, duties, pleasures, pursuits, and concerns have been exactly preserved. Even the usual and familiar world image could be preserved, through a hectic and persistent patch-and-stick activity that hides most nuances, while the transparent perpetuation of the animal has turned into a suspicious immediacy.
From now on, everything about humanity seems more like accidental attachments of a loose reality, ineffective manifestations, momentary interactions, sparks... remnants that cannot become dominant, yet do not prevent organization, stratification, and dissolution. These are what are left from a dream.
Everything looks the same. But a strange feeling is added to everything. The rotation of the world is reversed, and instead of becoming or gaining and expressing sense, it spills out into the depthless incomprehensibility of complexity, dispersing its already established meanings on the way.
This architectural project introduces a 15-meter incision, transforming the site's topography into a flexible plane for field interventions. It rejects traditional boundaries, focusing on dynamic, permeable spaces that adapt to environmental and institutional demands. Emphasizing multi-scalar interactions, the design bridges micro and macro scales, blending architecture, ecosystems, and infrastructures to support educational needs while maintaining flexibility and adaptability within the landscape.