With whom: Kadir Has University Faculty of Art and Design Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design
When: 2022
We took part in the workshop week organized for the first year students of Kadir Has University Interior Architecture and Environmental Design Department between 18-22 April with a 2-day workshop setup. In the workshop of 10 people, social traumas, disasters and disasters, which are closely related to today’s world, became our focus.
In the production process, which we started with conceptual discussions, we first asked the participants to focus on the concepts of ‘Crisis’ and ‘Disaster’ that shape the workshop title. After the scenarios shaped around a temporal layer and the framework drawn by these two concepts, we aimed to continue the production with a collective action.
We asked the participants, who were divided into groups of three, to make their own disaster definitions using architectural tools and to script it. In these scenarios, which are integrated with an event and time pattern and architectural tools, we have experienced together how architecture is not only a problem-solving tool, but also how its power in creating problems turns into a product of imagination.
After discussing the problems they created together with the participant groups who have the power to create problems, we tried to experience the instant/unexpected situations by focusing on thinking through design by mixing these three scenarios with different layers.
Participants in the final stage; they once again narrated how they faced the problem-solution scenarios they produced and articulated with each other, using architectural representation tools such as diagrams, collages and drawings. As a result of the workshop, the problems that are produced/self-generated, discussed or remained hidden to be discussed and possible solutions hidden in their inner potentials were transformed into a practical practice through design.
You can reach the productions of the workshop here.
Workshop Invitation:
Today we are facing a lot of crises and disasters in our world. When we confront a fact that is not familiar to our behavioral codes and life cycle (both biological and ecological) which we have, we tend to name it a “disaster or crisis”, since we can not handle it. An extraordinary social and psychological change is taking place right in front of our eyes —the impossible is becoming possible. An event first experienced as real but impossible becomes real and no longer impossible (once the catastrophe occurs, it is “renormalized,” perceived as part of the normal run of things, as always already having been possible). The gap which makes these paradoxes possible is that between knowledge and belief: we know the (ecological) catastrophe is possible, probable even, yet we do not believe it will really happen.
So this workshop aims to argue how is architecture able to propose any solutions to unexpected things which can be experienced as real but impossible. To talk inclusively we would love to participants create and represent their own life cycle scenarios and crisis in the first round(life without water etc.). After talking about these all creative and authentic scenarios, each participant will send another crisis to another life scenario through representational tools. Then all the first practices will be taken into account again with unexpected things that come from anyone else and everyone tries to handle those crises by using architectural representational tools.
Workshop coordinators: Feyza Çınar, Hakan Ilıkoba, Sam Price
Workshop participants: Berra Özbek, Muhsin Demirtaş, Başak Alkan, Hajra Chughtai, Fidan Ismailzade, Ebru Muratoğlu, Sude bayraktar, Yağmur Sude Beri, Utku Cevat Başkan, Emre Atasoy
