A SURFACE OF RE-OCCUPYING
Competition Project 2015 | Erald Varaku+Gülşah Aykaç
/Double click on the gallery/
(The competition was opened by CTRL-SPACE and the competition subject was entitled as ‘ Istanbul Community Market’ (http://www.ctrl-space.net/istanbul.html) Our proposal could be taken as an anti-project or a response against gentrification being targeted by the competition.)
Marketing the Values: A Surface of Re-occupying
In Kumkapı district, every street has its own distinctive character. It is important to sense the site within its daily life; thus we composed fragments of functions, emergent situations and people while experiencing the site. Specifically in the site, there are both housing and marketing facilities which people use for daily life entails. It could be claimed that the community, most of whom are Syrian and African immigrants, and marketing relation produces encountering spaces.
Hence first questions for us were:
What will be sold? Who is this market for?
Than we found our main problematic:
Being a place of meeting, the street has already been producing an important socio-spatiality, so how to create an architectural value?
There is a thin line (it is a very well known thick fact) between gentrification and creating an architectural value. The suggested program could be a violent destruction for the residents and the people of the neighbourhood. With this point of view, by re thinking the program we decided to create the opportunity for the functions situated in the area to spread in the site. People, functions and emergent situations are brought together once more under a surface of re-occupying. Our design has one element which is a dynamic, changeable cuttable, extendable surface: a shelter. It covers not only the framed site but also the street to open the boundaries. It climbs, invades the building situated at the site and opens it for a flexible use of the community.