Space of ambiguity: Toward the evanescence

Space of ambiguity: Toward the evanescence

Guerrier, G.

Schoonderbeek, M. (mentor)
Rommens, O. (mentor)
Jennen, P. (mentor)

Architecture and The Built Environment

Architecture

Public Building_Border Conditions

2014-07-01

When we walk on the streets in Istanbul, we are submerged by second use of space. The background offered by the city is an opportunity for interpretations. Facades are a layer of time, the streets a giant market, tracks in empty plots an inscription of flows... Spontaneity is overlapping with established rules. It is like the every built part of the city is customizable in a context of tremendous change. While entire districts are demolished and rebuilt in the name of modernity, social practices turns out to disappear leaving new spaces without appropriation due to the fact that individual expression is stifled. Thus we have to look from the inside of the informal use of formal spaces to imagine new ‘open’ spaces. However, while trying to conceptualize space in architecture it is difficult to grasp how the small everyday events and small details of spatial practice partake in the production of public realm. A theoretical pictorial language intends to sum up each of the situation. Through abstraction, as means to map, a focus is put on the spatiality of the appropriation. The idea is to unveil different practices encounter in the context of Istanbul which reveal different interpretations of what the city is for ‘common people’. Thus the aim is to understand the character of everyday life which might appear boring, repetitive and alienating but at the same time potentially original, vigorous and emancipating. It is important to articulate those mechanisms in order to understand the appropriation as part of the experience of interaction rather than just a framework of experience for the development of the project. The insights given by the research and the daily practices helped me to locate a strategic site to design a public building landscape based on the community. The project takes into account the social practices already in THE place. The main idea is to preserve the informal uses of space in a zone under a future eviction. Thus, the analysis of informal network in a macro scale shows where the most intense location is located. The project takes place on the edge of social interactions present on the site. It follows the border of the inscription made by the movement and practices of people. Thus, the project is placed as a link in the site, edging what is already there, contrasting but not conflicting. It is a link between past and future for new appropriations. This columns landscape appears as a drawing, blurring the practices, a sort of an ambiguous forest. A meticulous design phase allowed to leave room for indeterminacy. Thus, the project cannot be grasp at once, and the infinite possibility of routes allows an infinite discovery of spaces and an intense interaction between people, project and environment.

ambiguity
appropriation
Istanbul
border conditions

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:36ed132f-f9b0-45b2-8dc7-aee0583b7fcf

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2014 Guerrier, G.