For whom: NGO’S, local communities, individuals, architects and students
With whom: Architects, students and volunteers
When: 2014-2015
Within YAP (Young Architects Program), Istanbul Modern provides opportunity to young architects to design a temporary structure on its outer space for summer months. We are nominated to this challenging program , which is curated by İstanbul Modern and MoMA once in two years, by Hülya Ertaş. The whole process started with 40 nominated teams, continued as we were becoming a finalist with Flat-C, Pattu, Young&Ayata, Ali Sinan & Hasan Okan Çetin, finalised with a presentation day which ended with Pattu being selected as winner.
For the first elimination process, we have prepared a special portfolio including; our works for Gezi Park, Abandoned Rural Schools Project focusing on Ovakent phase and Revitalizing Cinema Beyoglu, which is one of the last movie theaters screening independent movies. You can view our letter of intent here.
Hereby we created a special timeline, for ease of accessibility to our works’ and events’ details from the establishment of HiM.
Through the whole process we discussed about “creating together” and tried to find ways for it, as we mentioned in our letter of intent. First step was announcing that we are open for collaborations and anyone can join the process, from different channels. We presented works done for “everyone” and we had the chance to be nominated for “everyone”. Our work started by actions questioning “who are everyone?” . We have visited several different type of neighbourhoods, talked with locals. The budget was another input to consider, which we analised it with the help of our daily and project oriented expenses.
From the very first time of when we were informed our nomination, we have questioned the publicity of the site and target audience. The main result of several meetings was, on the contrary of project brief, the product will become “placeless” and “timeless”.
Our process was fully transparent and including, social media groups, open video calls and daily workshop announcements. The main goal of the process was creating maximum interactions. You can find the final presentation file here, including the submission text below.
“ As we mentioned in our application, we have designed a transparent and collaborative process. In addition making open calls, organising workshops and discussions with different people in different places. we published whole process through social media channels. The main idea that we focused through process was thinking the project as a nomadic thing that will continue its life cycle after the 3 months on the Istanbul Modern site. With this approach on our minds, we adopted the idea of shaping the project to be adaptive to different kinds of needs from different kinds of communities. Our proposal is shaping the site as a meeting place for several projects, instead of designing a project for 3 months as described in the project brief. The project includes two solid layers. First one is the “cloud”, which is actually a semi transparent fishing net supported by helium balloons. The cloud defines boundaries of the area and provides shade for comfort. Second layer is the products that we design with NGO’s, designers, students and individual initiatives for them. These products have to have social benefit. These products thought to be placed on site on a grid, which thought to be divided according to the size of each. We predicted 20 projects to be designed collectively with a selection from our previous collaborators and also newly collaborators selected from our open call to create more interactions. After the three months these “products” thought to be headed to their original site, where the collaborator(s) specified before. “
