Turkish Architecture

As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage we present the proposal for the Turkish Pavilion. Below, the participants describe their contribution in their own words. 

An airplane that skidded off the runway in Trabzon, Turkey, earlier this month (with no injuries) may soon be repurposed into a library for the city.

Beoffice and HSY Architects’ competition-winning proposal for Bandırma Onyedi Eylül University Campus in Turkey represents a generation of knowledge that will flourish and support Bandırma’s innovation in industry and economy. The university will take an integrated approach to the region, blurring the boundary between campus and city with interactive spaces that can open up for flexible use. 

A School of Schools, the theme for the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, will "use, test, and revise a variety of educational strategies to reflect on the role of design, knowledge, and global connectedness" in Istanbul and around the world. Two calls for ideas—one for "schools" and one for "learners"—have been opened to interested parties.

Following an open call, a selection committee coordinated by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) has revealed Vardiya (The Shift) as the theme of the Turkish Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Curated by Kerem Piker, the exhibition will propose "a spatial organisation for meeting, encountering, and architectural production."

You’re going to wish you saw this Instagram worthy art installation. Gateways (@Landofceramics) at the central fountain in Granary Square, King’s Cross closed this week. It was designed to celebrate the DesignJunction event (September 21-24) an interior design show by and for the industry, set in challenging industrial sites as part of the greater London Design Festival.

UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, currently holding its forty-first annual session in the Polish city of Krakow, inscribed twenty new cultural sites on its World Heritage List, including the historic city of Ahmedabad in India, archaeological sites in Cambodia and Brazil, and a “cultural landscape” in South Africa. The Committee also added extensions to two sites already on the list: Strasbourg in France, and the Bauhaus in Germany. On the other hand, the historic center of Vienna was inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger as the Committee examined the state of conservation of one-hundred-and-fifty-four of its listed sites.

The Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts have announced that Jan Boelen has been appointed as Curator of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennale. This follows the 3rd—Are We Human?—which opened in September 2016 and was curated by Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina with a powerful, wide-reaching exploration of design and architecture in relation "the design of the species."

The American/Turkish architecture firm Eray Carbajo has unveiled Urban Rural, a new typology of urban living set to become a benchmark for future development in Istanbul, Turkey. The vision behind Urban Rural is for a hybrid model of living, combining close proximity to urban centers with the lush landscape of rural life. Challenging the status quo of typical residential typologies, the scheme will consist of modular hexagonal units with triangular gardens, forming an active façade designed to become a future landmark for the city.

Emphasizing a diverse combination of ecological, infrastructural and urban programs in their envisioned design, Istanbul and Madrid-based design practice Openact Architecture has been named the winner of the Bandirma Park Competition, which invited ideas to “introduce Bandirma to the world."