Plug'n Dwellings
Preface
Istanbul, which is a heterogeneous system of sequential perceptions in terms of population diversity, historical and geographical features, presents itself as a dynamic and dynamic city whole, open to new potentials within all this heterogeneity and multi-layeredness. In the context of these potentials, the people of Istanbul, who have a constantly changing and developing mental perception, are an urban model that is open to cultural interaction with its people in different cultures, free, in search of new ways and perceptually opening up to the environment they live in day by day.
Add-on Spaces project;
It is a shelter proposal based on the problems and potentials presented by the physical and sociological heterogeneity of Istanbul, a multicultural dynamic city that grows day by day, demands rapidly increase and differentiates, and production continues in agglomerations. As a result of researches based on observations and experiences in the context of urban housing in Istanbul, a multi-identity city, a wide variety of settlements and housing models have been seen. The process of the research led to Galata, one of the most physically striking and exciting examples of Istanbul's cosmopolitanism. As a result of some observations and researches made over the Galata region, its social structure and the way the house was shaped and located within this social structure became the inspiration point of the Extension Spaces.
Add-on Spaces, which make people experience the "shelter" conceptualized as itself by the metropolis, who is in search of new things, through questioning and changing situations, on the other hand, mobilize the undefined social and physical dead points in the heterogeneous city with shelter, shelter on existing units in the city instead of new productions that continue in agglomerations. It tries to find answers to the problems in the form of creating and making cross-uses with the proposal of sheltering through the innovative potential of the urban people.
On shelter;
According to Heidegger's definition, accommodation means residence; It is a prerequisite for our sense of belonging. Space is defined by people, people define themselves in space. If we consider the phenomenon of settlement, which is the basic quality of existence, in terms of spirit and body, we see that the spirit establishes a "place" for itself through the body and experiences the world.
According to Merleau-Ponty, the body is neither a subject nor an object; however, it is an extremely difficult mode of existence that deeply affects all our knowing activities. This mode of existence, our body, on the other hand, defines itself through the house.
Through the eyes of Quasimodo, Victor Hugo compared the cathedral to an egg, a nest, a house, a country, or a universe. Perhaps it was integrated with the form of the cathedral, as a snail's shell takes shape. This was his home, his hole, his envelope. He had attached himself to her like a tortoise to its shell. This majestic cathedral was his armor.[Victor Hugo Notre — Dame de Paris chapter 4 ]
In Gaston's Poetics of Space, the house, which is examined in its verticality from the cellars to the attic, is used as an analysis tool of the human spirit. The house is the "first universe" of human existence, which brings body and soul to the past, present and future with the images it creates.
"A closed thing needs to preserve memories without touching their image value. The memories of the outside world will never have the same resonance as the domestic ones. When we recall memories of the house, we add imaginary values to these memories: we are never a true historian, we always have a poet side, our excitement is just perhaps expresses a lost poem." [BACHELARD, Gaston]
The internalization of our home, our universe, in other words our shelter, and giving psychological meanings is undoubtedly a nature of human existence. On the one hand, our teachings that have come so far. The concept of home, which we have made sense of from the moment we know ourselves, is actually the concept of home of our mothers, fathers, grandfathers, and our nation.
A pre-approval.
Shelter has been our psychological refuge where we can clearly establish our hegemonies. To what extent have we moved away from our teachings and made derivations or experiences for the spaces we define as ourselves in these places of refuge?
While rethinking our home;
"The apartment model, where the space is used most effectively, reflects a totalitarian arrangement. This plan results in millions of people doing the same action and subject to the exact same framework. Since this arrangement of the space dictates what is to be done where, it also eliminates the sense of togetherness of those living under the same roof. It hinders creative attempts to change the use of space. It creates a sense of order in the environment with the location of everything, and reveals a false reality."[Gündüz Vassaf]
As Gündüz Vassaf mentioned here, we can reconsider our spaces, the places we live, on an experimental housing setup outside of the usual order. Our homes can be the first step in our creative process to overflow from inside to outside.
We can experience the places we live in through different situations. Contrary to the idea of an objective and binding order, is it possible to talk about a housing setup that is individually grasped with causal means and preferred?
"The modern and fully rationalized world has only apparently disenchanted; a demonic reification, a deadly curse of loneliness still hangs over it."[Adorno]
The loneliness here is the loneliness of the massed human being. We can say that the subject's exit from the interiority to an exteriority is not complete or even incomplete. Apart from the functional concept of dwelling, can the perceptual concept of housing put us in a questioning process again in its internal and external relationship? The way we open our dwellings to the outside and our sharing over them can expand our fields of perception and increase our senses.
metropolitan people;
The rhythm of life in the metropolis is fast and the sensory imagination is strong. Life is full of differences, oddities and is in constant change and transformation.
Although metropolitan life tends to lose some values and become massive in this change and transformation, the metropolis contains the metropolitan people who maintain their intellectual mobility within the constant mobility. It evolves into individuals who react with their brains instead of their emotions, thus gaining a higher level of understanding. Moving away from prejudices and the body-mind relationship makes the metropolitan person "free". Freedom is divided into internal and external. External freedom is the state of being able to do something, which is determined by the law, and to be able to do it. Inner freedom is being aware of the reactions of the mind, being aware of the social behaviors and not being dragged along with it.
The liberated human endeavors to produce free spaces. The expansion or effective use of the metropolis causes the areas of freedom to increase.
In this context, the questioned is how the metropolitan man can define his individuality in his own life through his accommodation and their potential to do so.
Over Galata to my shelter;
Galata region cosmopolitanity of Istanbul; It is one of the regions that reveal the most striking forms with its social structure, lifestyle, cultural development, ownership of entertainment, and urban image open to innovations and changes.
In addition to its location and historical background, it is an innovative region that adds social and physical characteristics to the foreign nationals living in the region.
Described as the "West in the East" in the past, where minorities lived, Galata has been a region that has a very intense relationship with Europe, where innovations first come to visit, with its entertainment venues, theaters and pantomime shows, it is a region that is constantly alive and open to innovations.
Galata's open structure to innovation, fiction and modernism from the very beginning still preserves it as a center of attraction, and the individuals who are in the center of attraction in this cycle add new identities to Galata. Galata, which also offers us diversity in the field of housing and accommodation with differentiating identities and innovations, has been a source of inspiration for the interrogation process.
It has been observed that the urban system and life style that meet the needs of modern life, the functions of different styles are intertwined and in harmony, and that housing establishes relations such as housing-commerce-entertainment apart from the housing-housing relationship. The fact that the house is so intertwined with different functions has increased social circulation and revealed a participatory urban life culture.
Galata has created a dynamic texture that is open to participation and sharing through the existence of a participatory urban life culture instead of the social categories lost for the sake of order, and the human value concepts of a place where human subjectivity such as housing exists.
The complex existence and functionality of the dwelling with other functions has been the source of energy for an experimental setup that we asked the dynamic urban dweller of the dynamic city through housing.
Apart from a status quo attitude, he created the fiction that housing can blend into other units individually, not through the housing-housing relationship, that housing and urban spaces will participate in the production of ideas, and that people can experience through housing.
Add-on Housing Model;
The exciting identity of the Galata region made us think about an add-on housing model, which we define as different and which we consider as an entertainment unit, in fact, at one point, will be added to the dead spots in life, revitalizing with the presence of the house and constructing the house on an unusually different surface. Based on this context, add-on dwellings are a study on the possibilities of the dwelling with an exciting identity and a provocative stance in a vibrant city like Istanbul.
As Heidegger mentions with an interpretive and phenomenological approach in the definition of space, different perceptions make people think and question their relationship with the place again. Beyond the world around us, there is the existence of the outer world and worlds that are fictionalized. After arriving from this point, additional dwellings can find dwellings in various spaces and worlds of the city. It is a model that can be located, in search of being able to "place". It is an experiment that tries to make people look at their space from a hermeneutic point of view. It makes interpretations, confusing, but even this confusion adds a sense of awareness to the individual. These feelings are the proof of the existence of man in space.
Cengiz Bektaş said that the most important feature of a person is to transform his environment into an environment where he can maintain the lifestyle he chooses, and to strive to improve the quality of the environment accordingly.
In two chapters, nests and shells, which Gaston explains in his Poetics of Space, he shows us what it might be like to live in shells, in bird nests, by making humans into tiny shapes. The Poetics of Space deals with the dialectic of the big and the small, the human and the world, under the headings of miniature and infinite size. It's an effort to experience.
Where add-dwelling;
A metropolitan city with multiple identities, Istanbul incorporates different parts and urban surfaces. While this metropolis of Istanbul turns it into a center of attraction at many points, its potentials also take place with its problematics.
Add-on dwellings, with the dictionary meaning of the word add-on, are derived from doing what a program cannot do with an add-on (a piece). In the supplementary housing work, the thing that the city cannot answer in the city is the attempt to find an answer through housing.
When we look at these questions, we discussed the situation of being an add-on residence in Istanbul over a few problematics that we come across.
These;
Housing production, which spreads all over the metropolitan city of Istanbul and continues in agglomerations, is a black hole with almost no end. These housing productions, which serve the commercial activities of the metropolitan city, are gradually spreading to the peripheries of the city, changing the boundaries and perception of the city. Istanbul, the city whose perceptions and boundaries have changed, consumes the concepts of street and neighborhood and individualizes them more. Despite all this going to the periphery and breaking away from the city and destroying the existing green areas, the add-on housing aims to exist by adding to the single-function buildings in the city that are not used at any time of the day or every day of the week. These buildings, which give meaning to their existence with housing, are actually poetized in houses in a sense. This model is to respond to the housing production agglomerations of the city, by adding these buildings, through housing. For example, a concert hall in the city can be turned into a potential for continuous use with accommodation instead of being empty during usage hours.
2. Although Istanbul is a lively city, many parts of it, despite its normal activity and diversity, are desolate and dangerous at night and have areas where people are afraid to wander. A solution to this day and night imbalance can be produced with units that are used at night, such as shelter, that activate the space after the evening hours.
The existence of shelter, the creation of small commercial units in line with the needs that will arise, the illumination of the street with the light of the house can revitalize the places we are afraid to enter at night. Based on this situation, it has been thought to produce a solution with add-on accommodation for the spaces in the city that are active during the day and dead at night. For example, the Eminönü-Mahmutpaşa region is deserted at night despite all its activity during the day. While this prevents us from going to those areas, it turns them into dead places. The residences added to revive these dead areas in the center of the city open the Eminönü-Mahmutpaşa area to night use.
3. Another problem is the regions in Istanbul, which are located in the center of the city but could not be fully integrated into the city, where the user socializes within himself, and the outward openings are closed for certain sociological reasons. When we look at this problematic for the first time, we see regions such as Dolapdere, Tarlabaşı, Fener-Balat.
Recently, the unplanned urbanization of the capital here!! Despite the innovative works that destroy the existing texture and social structure by taking shelter under its name, it has been considered in the add-on housing proposal, considering that more sharing intellectual solutions should be produced. With the add-on accommodation, socialized within itself, disconnected from the outside, the original local identity, the housing model here and communication and sharing with the user will be possible.
For example, let's think of an idealist painter, in the new region where he lives with the add-on housing, he will both enrich the social life of the people of this region and the inner dynamics of the people of this region, as well as bring new expansions and shares to the type of people who are closed in the existing texture. Maybe he will start drawing his pictures on the street.
How to add abode;
While adding the add-on dwellings to the suggested regions, they are articulated either with a brand new structure or by entering into the existing spaces, taking into account the physical texture of the region. It does not contain the concept of ownership. It cannot be purchased. It tries to make people experience that ownership and self-definition in housing is not just about purchasing and continuity. Even though we know that we will die one day, it is a space where we experience life through our body as we take care of our body, and it is a space that the individual rents and experiences.
Contrary to housing depotism, it is a housing model proposed with provocative approaches against the metropolitan and mass production, which is compatible with the developing and changing lifestyle of the metropolitan people, with these relations, which try to establish the internal and external relationship as much as possible, with these relations.
Its internal-external relationship can be conceptually likened to the Moebius Strip. It makes you feel the uninterrupted continuity of interior and exterior. The idea of folding the space reveals such a continuity. The folding of the space, that is, its different interpretation and experience, changes the traditional space and provides the transition from the functional space concept to the perceptual space. As Ponty said, our field of perception is not made up of sensations, but of things with the spaces in between. Add-on dwellings also aim to perceive our perceptions of space through multiple values, and to increase the sharing values of the citizens by making use of the open potential of the lonely urban dweller to experience the new and experimental.
Recognition of our concepts of experience and sensation is a thought process that tries to include the answers to the questions asked about increasing our potential to exist as dynamic individuals of the dynamic city.
It questions the potential of diversification through the human perception and relationships established with the house. It tries to make our analytical mind question the tendencies that we are conditioned by the situation of sheltering in different places.
Instead of repetition compulsions, it increases the diversity among our senses by considering the house from a completely different point of view. It aims to create models that connect with the tissue by inserting them into existing tissues.
In the developing and changing world where we try to use our emotional intelligence to the maximum extent, the add-on housing model is a model designed to use all the surfaces of the city in the most efficient way and to respond to the problems of the city through accommodation. While constructing all these, the main point of the brave new world is to question the accommodation of individuals who are provocative, subjective in the production of thought, avoid memorization as much as possible, have high internal dynamics, and have communication and participation with the outside world.