TITLE/TITULO Asst.Prof.(Phd)
Surname, Name/ Apellido,
Nombre
BAS YANARATES Didem
Institution/Institución
Country/País
TC İstanbul Kültür
University
Turkey
TEACHING OF VARIATIONS PROCEEDING CULTURAL LANDSCAPES
“MODELS OF PLACES”
didembas.01@gmail.com
d.bas@iku.edu.tr
The modern settlement of urban indicates the implemented living environment, “somewhere” full of
ready-made imaginations, having no genetic codes to survive as a “place” or to become a “place”.
The architectures of a living environment can be rich “to affect “but the place has to evolve and it
emerges inherently to make sense for inhabitants “to be affected”. The place triggers the
architectural ideas of people with a strong telling to keep on to explore. This dialogical process
charges in the mutations of a place with high adaptation capacity to vary. It is a reality of
architectural crisis of modern world and the urgent of distortion at our lives peeks to much more
loss of cultural landscapes due to much more loss of telos of architecture which is inspired by the
way of “to be affected from something else” inherited of a place.
The paper stands that, besides an innovative capacity of varied forms, the architectural thinking can
find a way to become a mutation for the emergent place. Such of this finding way for architectural
thinking is the goal of the first year design studio, which meets the idea of mutation proceeding to
create cultural landscape at the common strata. The students’ works of their layouts imply the
models, concerning at the paper as how they interfere and produce with each other. In this paper it
revolves around the spec of the first year design studio. The students develop the models
periodically, by the stages of creating varied modular forms in folding, curling of planes to spatially
structured units and generating a new topography as spontaneous nature of those patterns. It is
simultaneously followed by two main integrated teaching process trough algorithmic progression of
modules works at studio and sketching and drawing works at the historical and cultural settlements
of Istanbul. The site visiting case-studies were chosen strategically in order, starting from the
historical peninsula of İstanbul in case of “Süleymaniye” the Külliye and the mosque of the master
Mimar Sinan, where a morphogenesis tessellation was emerged from its homogeneous geometric
tectonic. The second study area was searched on the Art Nouveau’s Houses of Arnavutköy from the
Bosporus, where the curvilinear figures were investigated to tessellate as the main tool for
preliminary traits and properties of variation and continuity. The final case-studies area was choose
from Fener-Balat, where the differed religious cultures characterized the urban settlement as a
symbiotic-life form evaluation. So the goal of the study was managed to make clear and understand
how the flow of life generates the lands through micro to macro scale of “mahalle”, as the term of
the urban settlement.
The students’ models signify architectural patterns varied with their topography, made by neither
morphogenetic nor hylomorphic but the way of generating “the places”, proceeding manipulated
natures as in mean of cultural landscapes.
Each sketching work at the site-visiting of case-studies followed the studio works,
counterproductively, producing modules as pre-structural units to grow in more complex pattern.
The folding method employed effectively with simply defining techniques of cutting, twisting,
wrapping, knotting, rotating and so on.
Afterward the first case study of the pure geometry of “Süleymaniye”, the studio practice was
around for the idea of basic geometric perception. The modules vary through the primary shapes
regarding to be transformed in volumetric dimension. So they need justification to explore a pattern,
generates itself for a multiple time. The initial work for architectonic images were interrogated with
their transformational capacity to vary. The cognitive generation emerges from the structural
diagrams of pleating lines followed at folded surfaces. Contrary the previous site-visiting of
Arnavutköy Art Nouveau architectures employ the continuous curvilinear patterns, derived from the
twisted paper strips. The curves and loops were investigated for flowing enclosure in sense of skin.
The knotting of the loops integrates and generates cycling grids. They come out themselves as the
components of a constituted configuration. So they were not allowed to be a modular unit. The skins
of the forms generate in wrapped around the variable volumes and their evolvable capacities can be
expanded by the way of enclosing.
The final work was involved throughout an urban environment in genetic evolution, reading on the
symbiotic life cultures of the dwelling settlement of Fener-Balat. So the models standing over the
planar surface finally were installed in the system of coordinate by a topographic tessellation.
Life flows through the lands making them to become a “place”. The model works of topography were
going to gain their capacities to evolve through the architectonic of the skin-patterns.
The human builds on the ready-made sites of the earth but such a way of teaching to build an earth,
a vice-verse systematic comes on to play. No matter to be charged with the supernatural power of
architectural technologies but it is the bad-news that no one is immortal. Do we need the architects
of power or the architects of place, where we desire to live our rest of mortal lives? That is what the
architectural crisis means about.
The topographic identification of the creative forms introduces the students to comprehend how an
architectonic mutation can be possible and becomes the culture landscape, as such a life form of a
place.