Non-Peripheral: Re-Thinking the Organized Industrial Zone

Selin Sahin

SMArchS Architecture & Urbanism

Advisor:

Roi Salgueiro Barrio

Reader: Eran Ben-Joseph

The Organized Industrial Zone (OIZ) in Turkey emerged in the 1960s as a primary model for industrial development. Combining base infrastructure, specific land use rules, financial incentives such as tax exemptions, and partial self-governance, the OIZ is essentially a cluster of light to medium industries. It was meant to facilitate capital flows and later became seen as a tool to drive urbanization. This thesis examines the development, consequences, and future prospects of OIZs. It traces their origins from a Checci and Company report, based on the industrial estates, commissioned through an agreement between the governments of Turkey and the United States, to their rapid proliferation in the 21st century.

Today, there are over three hundred individual sites scattered across the country. Varying in size and complexity, these zones are born from policies and regulations that have barely changed since the late 1960s. As the OIZ model stands today, both at the policy level and in prac- tice, there is a multitude of issues related to their internal organization, urban planning, impacts on the environment, regional disparities, and social equity. In exploring the evolving relationships between OIZs and the urban texture, sped up by expanding boundaries and changing paradigms in the industry, I submit that the design of OIZs should not be peripheral in our thinking.

Selecting a particular site that is exemplary of the spatial conditions of many OIZs, I propose design interventions to address current problems and speculate the future of these zones. The components of the proposal factor in the city, within a material ecologies awareness. Through these proposals, this thesis aims to spatialize some of the hopes and narratives about these zones in the political consciousness and offer new urban visions.

Between the Lines: Encoding Relations Through Body, Tool, and Algorithm

Zachary Schumacher

SMArchS Architectural Design

Advisor: Brandon Clifford

Readers: Jaffer Kolb & Curtis A Roth

The tools architects use orchestrate the discipline in seen and unseen ways. In recent decades, we have swapped early forms of mechanical drawing instruments for digital tools with unimaginable computing power. While this increased level of computational literacy allows us to script and code architectural forms more efficiently, it has also created incongruities between the computationally described object and material constructions. At times the digital tools we depend on today go as far as defining the aesthetic of our buildings. To complicate this further, the digital tools most often solicited by the architectural practice are non-native imports adapted for their visual potential and practical uses. Meaning embedded within the programming of tools that shape our buildings are residual values of other disciplines. For example, we can even trace the origins of the CAD software back to engineers and mathematicians at Boeing and here at MIT, who sought to mechanize the construction of splines and irregular curved surfaces for the production of slipstream automobiles, toothbrushes, and even letterforms. And much like the hidden algorithms in the background of our digital tools, there is an apparatus of choreography surrounding our physical tools that encode instructions on how the body engages with the object. In other words, the machines we use produce not only drawings but gestures as well, keying us into the always-present yet rarely discussed embodied dimensions of tools.

To expand upon the embodied dimensions of our tools today, we need to reconsider the machine as the site of intervention. Motion data and performance envelopes surrounding our tools extend beyond the projective reenactment of the machine and offer us a means to measure the derivative of what it takes to produce a drawing, a surface, or a construction. One way to do this is to dislocate the spline from its formal geometry associated with slipstream construction and recast it as a way to record the tumble-type inscriptions surrounding an object’s performance — a tactic to mutually mark and negotiate the activity between humans and machines.

Yaku Cosmo-Infrastructures: Designing with Water Across the Andes

Kevin Malca Vargas SMArchS Architectural Design

Advisor: Cristina Parreño Alonso

Readers: Sheila Kennedy & Mohamad Nahleh

Water in the Andes is a dual entity, substance, and Cosmos. This thesis is a provocation to reimagine water infrastructures across the Andes as a collaboration of ancestral and modern practices of relating with Water.

As an Andean descendant, my mother taught me that Water is a living being. A series of walks during the summer of 2022, visiting ancestral places, learning from Water nurturers, and participating in the water festival in the South of Peru allowed me to reconnect with my family knowledge. Marcela Machaca, Water Nurturer, taught me that the Andean cosmology considers Yaku (Water in Qechua) to be a person. Yaku Mama (Mother Water) creates life in the Andes through a reciprocal nurturing relationship with the communities.

In contrast, modern epistemologies frame Water as a resource managed through infrastructures that extract, store, and distribute it across places. This approach disregards the Andean communities' ancestral practices, causing a disruption in the local ecological cycles. In the Quispillacta community, the duality of Water is evident, as they are both a resource managed by a dam and a living entity nurtured through ancestral practices.

The incoming infrastructure planned by the government in Quispillacta raises an opportunity to embrace this duality by asking, how can we address the need for water access while also embracing the ancestral practices of living with Water?

An infrastructural turn is necessary. This thesis argues for an alternative way to represent, design, and live with Water in the Andes. It proposes Cosmo-infrastructures as a new architectural paradigm that embraces the collaboration of ancestral and modern ways of interacting with Water. By proposing the design of a seasonal learning path in Quispillacta, this thesis articulates stations that mediate, interchange, and regen- erate Water in collaboration with the local ecology. This project invites us to rethink the inherited colonial binary divisions between Water and land, architecture, and landscape, and, most importantly, humans and nature.