Architecture as Measure

Architecture as Measure Published by Actar Publishers, New York, Barcelona www.actar.com Author Neyran Turan Graphic Design Studio Lin Copyeditor Paula Woolley Proofreader Matthew Abbate Printing and binding Tiger Printing All rights reserved © edition: Actar Publishers © texts: Neyran Turan © images: Neyran Turan (except as otherwise noted) This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, on all or part of the material, specifically translation rights, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilm or other media, and storage in databases. For use of any kind, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained.

This book has been made possible by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Distribution Actar D, Inc. New York, Barcelona.

New York 440 Park Avenue South, 17th Floor New York, NY 10016, USA T +1 2129662207 salesnewyork@actar-d.com Barcelona Roca i Batlle 2-4 08023 Barcelona, Spain T +34 933 282 183 eurosales@actar-d.com Indexing English ISBN: 9781948765299 PCN: Library of Congress Control Number: 2019939706 Printed in China, 2019

Architecture as Measure 1

p. 7

Another Planetary: Measure for the Anthropocene

2

p. 31

After Nature Museum of Lost Volumes

3

p. 51

Geographic Object Strait

4

p. 81

Matters Around Architecture Nine Islands

5

p. 113 Geology of Media, Digital Rubbish New Cadavre Exquis

6

p. 133 Planetary Diorama as Tableau Middle Earth

7

p. 155 Territory as Interior Flatbed Junk

8

p. 177 Planetary Theater Fake Earths

9

p. 199 Wonder Room as Assembly Our Junk, Their Ruin

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p. 231 Subtlety as Engagement Nine Drawings, Seven Models As Built – As Lived p. 259 Notes p. 295 Credits and Acknowledgments

46

Museum of Lost Volumes

visitors were both astounded and heartbroken that these volumes were all lost from the earth’s surface.

WONDER ROOM OF RARE EARTH SPECIES The next room of the museum was a Wunderkammer, a Wonder Room, a cabinet of curiosities. It showcased inverted miniature models of rare earth mines for each of the seventeen mineral types that were placed carefully

47

Museum of Lost Volumes

in preserved glass boxes. The collection of the miniature models presented what historian Krzysztof Pomian once called “the collection as a microcosm,” in his book Collectors and Curiosities, which as he writes, renders visible the “desire to miniaturize the constituent parts of the world in such a way as to allow the eye to take them all in at the same time, without losing any of their most intimate features.”18 Varying in size, shape and texture, each miniature mine model was filled with different stories and different lives.

Wonder Room of rare earth species.

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Measure for the Anthropocene

TRAVERTINE. (Upper drawing) Everyday life around our offices with travertine curtain walls.

Maintenance work outside, office work inside.

(Lower drawing) Travertine to be transported is waiting at the port. Users enjoy the prolonged process.

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Measure for the Anthropocene

CONCRETE. (Upper drawing) Our buildings are the field conditions of concrete cores, walls and column grid plan typologies. Nothing more, nothing less.

(Lower drawing) Eventually, All That Is Concrete Melts into Rubble. Any concrete building to be demolished is a ruin for the city.

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Measure for the Anthropocene

NEMESTUDIO, Nine Islands, 2016, installation view at the third Istanbul Design Biennial, “Are We Human?,” 2016. Photo by Sahir Uğur Eren.

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Measure for the Anthropocene

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Measure for the Anthropocene

New Cadavre Exquis, 2017. Digital readymades as a Sample Collection from the Earth.

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Measure for the Anthropocene

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Measure for the Anthropocene

Reassembly Archetype-1. Primitive forms, stairs and an HVAC unit.

Reassembly Archetype-2. Picnic basket, drainage pipe and a grater on top of an arcade.

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Measure for the Anthropocene

Reassembly-as-Copper as an apartment building.

arrangements. Upon gaining a material definition, however, each Reassembly Archetype obtains architectural properties such as scale, program and further specificity as a “Reassembly-as-______�: Reassembly-as-Copper, Reassembly-as-Terrazzo, Reassembly-as-Marble and Reassembly-as-Stucco. Ranging from a small retail shop and a house to large-scale housing and infrastructure buildings, each Reassembly-as-______ stages and exploits the potentials of its archetypal composition as a building, which eventually is destabilized by time and the materiality of its mass. The project tackles the elongated temporality of

146

Middle Earth—Dioramas for the Planet

ology of climate change to future generations?” declared the Council Secretary in the big press conference right after the meeting. After months of deliberation, the Council decided to build a giant museum at the very middle of the earth, situated at 0°N 00°E, the exact location on earth where the equator crosses the prime meridian near the Gulf of Guinea, Africa. The museum was named “Middle Earth.”

Instead of classifying natural specimens (as a normal natural history museum would), Middle Earth contained large halls with very large-scale dioramas, each displaying a specific problem brought about by climate change taking place at the “middle of the earth,” i.e., around the equator, the earth’s zero-degree latitude: the melting of the icebergs, deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia, plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean and sand mining in Singapore.

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Middle Earth, 2017. The entrance hall of the museum and the relief map model.

The entrance hall of the museum had a giant relief map model, which showed the exact location of the museum on earth. The museum was made up of an enfilade of many rooms, each containing a large-scale diorama. Each room was at the scale of a building with a distinct form. Each of these rooms acted as an environmental archive, a cabinet of curiosity focused on climate change. The first room of the museum, titled the Theaters of Deforestation, was a large room containing dioramas that depicted the deforestation process in Brazil and Indonesia, around the zero-degree latitude. Each diorama depicted the act of clearance, the removal of forest for a non-forest use. Each diorama displayed a particular tree species and the activities of its clearance in detail.

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Measure for the Anthropocene

Theaters of Deforestation.

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Measure for the Anthropocene

188

Fake Earths: A Planetary Theater Play

Fake Earths, 2018. The Potemkin Village scene on stage.

The scene depicts the work space where the many technical aspects and conceptual references related to the construction of these large-scale artifacts—such as the mountain studies of geographer Alexander von Humboldt and architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc—are ne-

189

Fake Earths: A Planetary Theater Play

gotiated and enacted through various design drawings, models and other related everyday objects. Similar to art historian Svetlana L. Alpers’s discussion of the deliberate collapse between the depicted scene of the painting and the setting of its production in seventeenth-century