ONUR CAN TEPE PORTFOLIO
A LINEAR HISTORY OF 3 PROJECTS
The Portfolio
A Linear History of Three Projects
Onur Can Tepe
LIST OF WORKS ANARCITY
ARTI YAPI OFFICES
Research with MVRDV
Interior Design
MEGALOPOLITICS
POSTHUSET REFURBISHMENT
Masterclass with AMO
Competition Proposal
NİSANTASI FURNITURE STORE
RAUF DENKTAS MOUSOLEUM
Interior Design
Competition Proposal
DIGITALIZING NETWORKS
THE MEGACITY
Masterclass with Alejandro Zaera Polo (AZPA)
Research with 51N4E+ARUP
STRUCTURALISM
INFOBANK
Masterclass with Herman Hertzberger
Prize winning competition proposal
SCAMBIA RIVANA
BRUSSELS COURTHOUSE
Workshop with Ecosistema Urbano
Prize winning competition proposal
DEMO+CRITIC+URBANISM
MUSICOLOGY MUSEUM
Prize winning competition proposal with AECOM
Architectural proposal
PARFE RESTAURANT AND BAR
STORY OF A CITY: THE BAZAAR
Interior Design
Short Movie
TEPE LAW OFFICES
HOTEL OF 45 BOXES
Interior Design
Architectural Proposal
METROPOLITAN NODE
SUSTAINING ‘THE VILLE CONTEMPORAINE‘
Urban Design with IND
Competition Proposal
ISMAIL BESIKCI LIBRARY
DIARY-WHARF
Interior Design
Competition Proposal
ISMAIL BESIKCI CULTURE CENTER
GEZI PARK MUSEUM
Architectural Proposal
Bachelor Thesis Project
ONE MASTERCLASS
ONE RESEARCH
ONE PLAN
with
with
with
AMO
51N4E + ARUP
IND
THE PORTFOLIO: ‘A LINEAR HISTORY OF 3 PROJECTS‘ IS A RETROSPECTIVE READING OF THREE KEY PROJECTS IN RELATION TO EACH OTHER. THEY ARE PUT IN THE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER IN ORDER TO ILLUSTRATE HOW THE IDEAS AND CONCEPTS HAVE MOVED FROM ONE PROJECT TO ANOTHER AND MOLDED A POSITION AS A RESEARCHER AND AS AN URBANIST.
THE MASTERCLASS WITH AMO HAVE SEEDED THE INITIAL IDEAS OF SYNTHESIZING MODES OF DEALING WITH INFORMATION. THE RESEARCH IS AN APPLICATION OF THESE METHODS ON A YEAR LONG RESEARCH PROCESS AND EVENTUALLY SUCEEDING TO CREATE A COMPLEX AND ACCURATE PICTURE OF THINGS. THE PLAN IS A LARGE MASTER PLAN THAT BY USING RESEARCH TECHNIQUES MANAGES TO DELVE INTO THE COMPLEXITIES OF THE SITE AND FORMULATES ITS ANSWER OUT OF THAT PROCESS.
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Megalopolitics masterclass was held at Berlage Institute and curated by AMO (Reineer de Graaf, Laura Baird, Tanner Merkeley). The masterclass is devoted to explore the relationship between “megacity“ and “politics.“ Organized within 8 groups each looking at sub-topics under the fictitious concept of Megalopolitics, our role in the masterclass was to delve into the phenomenon of ’competing professions.’ The hypothesis that was put in front of us was that there are professionals from other disciplines who are interested in the city services in relation to its growing robustness in the global economy and our task was to explore that hunch. Team: Onur Can Tepe (Berlage Institute), Calvin Chua (AA) Dace Gurecka (Strelka Institute), Roman Kuchukov (Strelka Institute) , Hiroki Muto (Berlage Institute)
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1 - IKEA, Siemens, IBM, Shell, Singapore, AECOM are all the growing actors in the city business for the past few years. We wanted to know what potentials they have seized and our profession have failed to realize. We urged to see what ¨the city¨ meant to them and if we can learn from that.
HOW DOES THE CITIZENS BENEFIT FROM THE NEW APPLE CAMPUS?
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WE ARE THE LARGEST TAX PAYER IN CUPERTINO. WE ATTRACT TALENTS TO THE CITY. WE RUN FREE BUSSES.
2 - We have looked at a variety of data to reveal the thinking out, yet nothing was as straight forward as Steve Jobs’ answer to the Cupertino City council when he was asked about the contribution of Norman Foster designed new Apple campus to the city of Cupertino.
3 - The phenomenon is visible through business web sites such as Fastcompany in terms of the ever increasing rate of articles related to urbanism since the late 2000s.
4 - In those articles, the city is simplified to its basic functioning, stripped to its services. 5 - From that stand point the city is simple...
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6 - ...and the opportunities are overwhelming.
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7 - City is measured, calculated and monitored in centers that are found by IT giants, like the ones in Rio De Janerio. 8 - It is a city that the life of citizens has huge economical impacts when their everyday actions are multiplied. Therefore they are the protagonists of this new conception of urban habitats. It is a conception of the city that has never been explicitly declared, but unknowingly accepted by their executers. 9 - So we wanted to take a closer look to who are these executers really....
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10 - The list of Top 150 firms in terms of their design based revenue shows no names that are known to us. The only familiarity we stumble upon comes pretty down in the list with SOM. It is clearly not the territory of Foster, Mvrdv, Oma as the city makers but the territory of engineers and consultants. 11 - They are the true makers of your city. There is no manifesto, no theoretical agenda, there is only pure action. Than it is worth having a look to their world, their values and systems to understand who they are. On the top of the list, AECOM becomes the focus of investigation.
12 - AECOM is not a single entity, it is an amalgamation of several professionals into a single entity. it not only provides architectural services but also engineering, consultancy, operational services, investment management etc.
12 - It is an environment in which most of the board members are engineers. When graphically illustrated along with the Chinese, American and Dutch governments, the collective mindset becomes comparable.
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13 - And it is this mindset that also has implications on their creations. Habitats of smooth services all designed in-house.
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14 - But amalgamation also comes with some other gifts.
16 - Some of these individuals also sits at the boards o
15 - The board of AECOM consists of 12 single individuals.
work of AECOM.
of several other companies which is the expanded net-
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17 - And the board members of those companies also has chairs at some other companies. In only 2 steps we reach to 15 companies, whose total yearly revenue amounts to 398.000 billion usd. Something slightly lower than the gross yearly income of the entire Norway, world’s largest 24th economy. 18 - It is not just a partnership of shared know-how but also a political and financial condition. The condition of amalgamation..
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rtune 100 Company Executive Offices
er a master contract, AECOM provided full100 interior services forthemselves new 88,000–squa 19 - It is thissupplier network that allows AECOM to build executive offices of many Fortune companies. design These are interiors that manifest as ¨elegant environments with high energy efficiency performances, developed LEED certification.¨ executive offices. The client’s desire from thethrough outset was the fusion of elegant interiors with energ ency and the healthy work atmosphere developed through LEED certification.
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20 - And again it is the politics of amalgamation that have been shaping the most important urban developments of the last decade: London 2012, Rio 2016 and perhaps Tokyo 2020? 21 - Executive office interiority or olympics exteriority, amalgamation is the secret manifesto of these habitats.
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22 - However once you start going bigger, you can not stop it. The table on the left indicates the phenomenon clearly: acquisitions of Aecom increases even though the revenues decrease.
23 - Then it can be speculated that it is perhaps not just architecture that “beyond a certain scale acquires the properties of Bigness.” Businesses also do.
24 - And it really do seem “incredible that the size of architecture (or business) alone embodies an ideologicam program.”
25 - YET, some say that “anyone who believes in indefinite growth on anything physical on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist.”
26 - That’s why, perhaps “Bigness is on its way to extinction - like the dinasaur.”
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SPECULATIVE RESEARCH PROCESS OF MEGALOPOLITICS WAS ABOUT COVERING AS LARGE TERRITORIES OF KNOWLEDGE AS POSSIBLE, LOOKING AT EVERY SINGLE CLUE (A WORD, A CHART, AN IMAGE) TO NAVIGATE YOURSELF WHEN TRYING TO UNDERSTAND AN EMERGENT PHENOMENON. THEN, BY TELLING A STORY OUT OF THEM, ONE IS ENABLED TO SEE THE CONNECTIONS THAT WAS NOT VISIBLE BEFORE.
LATER, I HAVE APPLIED THESE TECHNIQUES ON A YEAR LONG RESEARCH PROCESS, MERGING THE TECHNIQUES OF AMO WITH THE COLLABORATORS OF THE RESEARCH STUDIO: 51N4E AND ARUP. THE RESULT OF THIS HYBRIDIZED RESEARCH THAT IS SPREAD THROUGH THE YEAR LONG STUDIO, HAS BEEN A MORE COMPLEX AND ACCURATE PICTURE OF THE ACTUAL WORLD WHICH TOOK THE FORM OF A BOOK AND AN EXHIBITION.
51N4E + ARUP
The Megacity:
Food, Rituals and Logistics test case Istanbul
The Megacity studio at the Berlage is run by Brussels based architecture firm 51N4E and the Amsterdam branch of ARUP along with 8 researchers from the Berlage. The year-long research studio focused on the conflicts and compliments between inhabitants and the city systems with the aim of applying principles of social sustainability to evaluate these conflicts and compliments. A test case was chosen as Istanbul in order to ground the concept of megacity to a physical example and the book is the result of this collective research process along with an exhibition that was held at TU Delft.
Team: Onur Can Tepe, Hiroki Muto, Taesan Choi, Andres Lopez, Gi Son, Piya Limpiti, Olga Sankova, Jin Yeong.
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1 - The book is a collective production of eight researchers consisting eight chapters each written by one researcher and forms a whole in their togetherness. Six of these chapters are projects in the sense of suggesting six strategies for retrofitting Istanbul and the other two chapters, one of which is mine, are chapters that formulate a more systematic approach to tackle Istanbul’s urbanity. 2- My chapter is a magazine titled Istanbul, Behind the Scenes. The magazine is about delving into the complexity of the city and to suggest directions for public authorities of Istanbul.
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3 - The magazine is titled “Istanbul, Behind the Scenes” and aims to document the megacity from the perspective of public planning, governmental structures, large-scale institutionalised developers and it is manifested with the cover story of “Politics of Integration”.
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4 - It is written in 4 chapters each looking at the issue from a joint perspective of politics, culture and management. This strategy is adopted in order to clarify the confusing complexity of urbanism practices. Only from such joint perspective of several disciplines real complecxities of a megacity can be better understood.
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5 - The city’s facts and actors are vibrant and noisy creating a landscape of data about the hustle-bustle of the city.
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6 - However, despite the seeming complexity of urban actors, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality has a very clearly structured urban management model. It is a model that isolates the city services from each other and each department perceives the world from their respective point of views. 7 - The result is a megacity that is comprised of an archipelago of city services.
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8 - It is the ambition of the article to not just to document the current conditions but also to illustrate the necessity of horizontally integrating those actions into each other for a megacity that can deal with complexity better.
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9 - And the Lack of horizontal integration amongst the public institutions is not just an urbanistic problem in Turkey, it is also visible amongst the nation-wide institutes such as ministeries. 10 - This is about the mentality of doing things in the public bodies of the city and this can be challenged from a managemental point of view, which is the subject of Measuring Istanbul.
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11 - Public investments of Istanbul are made with quantitative concerns with a singular agenda. Qualitative management models are argued as a guide for city authorities to transform their measure of success and create sustainable urban qualities.
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12 - All the strategic plans of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality measures their success by numerical figures, narrowing their world view to what they can measure and control. The city is the result of this outdated management model and the actors of it are pretty content to meet their numerical goals such as building X square meters of social housing in Y amount of time. 13 - This of course is for the price of not knowing what it amounts to in the overall picture.
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14 - The document requesting permission to visit the state owned port Haydarpasa Liman覺 in Istanbul as part of the field trip for this work, spent a week in the administrative bodies of Istanbul. After circulated around numerous institutes, it was full of stamps, checks and signatures, exemplifying the inability of the higher officials to give responsibility to the front-line officials. Whereas contemporary, qualitative management models argues for pushing the responsibility downwards in organisations... 15 - ...and that is not just a managemental challenge but also a cultural one which is explained in the article The One Man Show
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16 - Decision giving mechanisms of Istanbul are hierarchical, the leadership figures are parental. This cultural phenomenon effectively avoids both vertical sharing of the responsibilities and horizontal formation of collaborations. As a result, The situation is either way absolute submission or infinite conflict. Istanbul is the consequence of these interactions.
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17 - Visits to the public bodies of Istanbul’s municipality and its directorates were not just verbal experiences but also visual. The one man show is a photographic article of leaders of Istanbul.
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18 - These are the leaders of their own territories, one is responsible of the food, the other is responsible of the public housing. It is their way of doing things that defines the qualities of the city. Istanbul is materialised under the influence of their leadership behaviours.
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19 - And there is also the political aspect of the question in hand. Metropolitan governance is a big matter for states to govern their metropolitan areas. It includes varying degrees of conflicts and consensuses amongst the main protagonists of cities. The article investigates status quo of Turkish urbanism in terms of its politics.
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20 - When the risks and opportunities megacities pose are so extreme they also become a primary subject on the national level, the consequence of this phenomenon is the prime minister giving a spontaneous decision live on tv about the future of a former airport field in Istanbul to be converted into a park. Istanbul’s urbanism has always been open to spontaneity.
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21 - As a consequence, events that take place on Istanbul can create a butterfly effect in the entire nation. Recent Gezi demonstrations that happened during the production of this article has made a nation-wide impact. Interestingly, it was about a public square in Istanbul. Megacities are the generators of action.
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22 - It was a tempting speculation to make but at the mean time an almost impossible-to-ignore finding of the research that Turkey won’t win the olympics bid for 2020 summer games. The article took the risk on June 2013 and turned out to be correct in September 2013 when the Olympics Comitee declared that they choose Tokyo despite all the contrary bets.
WHEN THE DIGITAL RESEARCH TECHNIQUES OF AMO ARE COMBINED WITH MORE ANALOGUE TECHNIQUES SUCH AS SITE VISITS AND INTERVIEWS IN A MUCH LONGER PROCESS, MORE COMPLEX PICTURE OF THE WORLD IS DRAWN, THEREFORE MORE ACCURATE UNDERSTANDING OF REALITY HAS BEEN POSSIBLE WHICH GIVES THE RESEARCHER CREDIBILITY TO SPECULATE ABOUT THE FUTURE.
SOON AFTER THE RESEARCH, I HAVE HAD THE CHANCE TO APPLY THE FINDINGS AND THE TECHNIQUES OF THE RESEARCH TO AN URBAN PLAN WITH THE ROTTERDAM BASED OFFICE IND WHEN COLLABORATING WITH THEM ON THEIR COMPETITION PROJECT FOR KURBAGALIDERE VALLEY IN ISTANBUL; AN AREA WITH 2 650.000m FOOTPRINT IN THE CENTRAL ISTANBUL.
IND [Inter.National.Design]
METROPOLITAN NODE a masterplan for the Kurbagalidere Valley in Istanbul
Kurbagalidere Valley in Istanbul is soon to go significant transformation following major transportation investments that are made city-wide which has strong implications on the valley. It is under these conditions the local municipality took an initiative to organize an ideas competition for the valley of 650.000 m2 with the brief of reorganizing the existing program in the area without adding anything more.
Team: Onur Can Tepe, Felix Madrazo, Arman Akdoğan, Andres Lopez, Gülçin Özbaş, Alejandro Gonzalez Perez, Maria Purrinos Rodriguez
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1 - Situation: The area is huge and the site is complex. A stadium, train roads, main highway connection points, municipality building, wedding building, a creek and car parks (everywhere), all agglomerated in the site. 2 - Opportunity: The complexity and enormity of the site and its connection to the recent transportation investments of the city makes it possible to create a much wider impact than the boundaries of the site. 3- Risk: In search for a simple answer, falling into the trap of naivety and ignoring the complexities and specificities of Istanbul’s urbanity.
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YENIKAPI
KURBAGALIDERE
DENIZ ULASIMI RAYLI ULASIM KARAYOLLARI
Position of Kurbagalidere in the midst of citywide systems N
0
1 km
4 - The red line is the new train network of the city which for the first time connects Asia to Europe with train tracks as well as introducing an innercity train to Istanbul. With that investment the city will put itself into a much more prominent position in the wider region enabling a direct train from Paris to Baghdad possible for the first time in history. 5 - The station in our site is where the international train crosses with the city-wide train as well as many other public transportation means.
6 - It was the revelation of the research that Istanbul suffers from lack of integration between city systems on a variety of levels. (political systems, transportation systems, administrative systems etc.) 7 - Heterogenous form of public transportation illustrates this phenomenon clearly, the network is an agglomeration of investments that are made under different circumstances with a different agenda. (see the diagram below) 8 - Therefore the project aims to concentrate those systems into each other and makes a hub that vertically packs the infrastructure to a complex whole. 9 - YET the question is, how does one organize the complexity that we embrace into a simple scheme?
Public Transportation Network of Istanbul 42
Distances covered with each public transportation system
1 - INFRASTRUCTURAL BARRIERS
2 - COMPRESSED INFRASTRUCTURE
5 - DENSE LANDSCAPE AXIS
6 - WET LANDSCAPE AXIS
Train tracks and car roads passing by the site horizontally, seperates the area into 3 impenetretable zones.
By compressing the infrastructure into an adjacent whole, an elevated line with a width of 100 meters is created.
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A forest like landscape axis is created giving the much needed oxygen to the area, reducing the urban heat island effect.
A wet landscape axis is created along the both sides of the creek comprising several public open air facilities that gives life to the district.
3 - TRANSPORTATION HUB
4 - BUILT AXIS
By intertwining the infrastructure with a transportation hub the system is in- A hard landscape axis is created around the hub linking the stadium to the tegrated into each other and a passage from north of the side to the south has public buildings through the transportation hub. Under this dynamic axis all been possible. the car parks are concentrated. 44
7 - NEW EDGE
A new edge looking over the park is created giving the valley a new face with the aim of promoting a renewal at the adjacent built stock over time.
8 - CONNECTIONS
The existing waterside promenade on both sides of the creek is connected into each other as well as pushing the sea effects inner city.
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URBAN LAYERS yeni yapilar
10 - The effects of the operation is calculated beyond the boundaries of the site by strategizing an ambition for our site: to be a second door to Kad覺k繹y Neighbourhood (adjacent neighbourhood with a central access point mainly dependent on sea transportation)
11 - And a city wide ambition has been sketched: being the superstructure mevcut yapilar
component of the recent infrastructural developments of the city.
12 - Rather then layering the site into horizontal clusters, a vertical stacking of city sytems (topography, landscape, infrastructure, built environment, transportation hub) enabled the scheme to benefit from complexity and simplicity at the mean time. 47
ulasim
13 - And it was a necessity to design the machine that would integrate all these systems into each other: the transportation hub.
peyzaj
topografya
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TRANSPORTATION HUB 14 - The transportation hub is a machine that organizes human and non-human flows.
15 - It integrates non-human factors (minibus, dolmuĹ&#x;, bus, taxi, tram, metrobus, highway and train tracks) into each other and spreads the human flows that are generated out of those into the park, the built axis and the forest axis.
16 - That is the machine that disciplines flows.
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Longitudional Section
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FLOWS 14 - By concentrating the transportation systems on the edges of the site, car parking under the ground and the passing by roads below the ground, an entirely pedestrian zone is created inside.
15 - With its directionality, the landscape guides the flows gently between the clusters of plantation between the creek and the square. Crossing Zones
16 - The hub is the generator of flows and landscape is the distributor of it.
16 - The operation is a mere reorganisation of flows
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Public Transportation Scheme
Pedestrian Flows
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IT IS THE ALLOWED COMPLEXITY THAT MAKES IT POSSIBLE FOR A VARIETY O
OF CITY ELEMENTS TO EXIST SIDE BY SIDE FOR TRULY URBAN CONDITIONS.
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YET, IT IS THE SIMPLIFICATION PROCESS THAT RENDERS THE CONTRADICTIONS OF MU
ULTIPLE DEMANDS MANAGABLE AND THAT IS THE RESULT OF DIGESTING COMPLEXITY.
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THIS PROCESS IS NO DIFFERENT THAN RESEARCHING ABOUT A PHENOMENON AND
D TAKING A POSITION AS A RESULT OF THE RESEARCH TO HAVE AN INFLUENCE ON IT.
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URBAN DESIGN PROCESS OF “METROPOLITAN NODE“ APPLIES THE PREVIOUS RESEARCH TECHNIQUES AND FINDINGS TO UNDERSTAND COMPLEXITIES OF A SITE IN RELATION TO THE WIDER CITY. THEN THE AMBITION IS TO TO GIVE AN ANSWER TO IT WITH A SIMPLE GESTURE THAT IS THE RESULT OF DIGESTING COMPLEXITY.
SPECULATIVE RESEARCH METHODS THAT WERE SEEDED IN THE MASTERCLASS ARE ESSENTIALY ABOUT DELVING INTO THE COMPLEXITIES OF A PHENOMENON BY LOOKING AT AS WIDE SOURCES AS POSSIBLE, THEN TAKING AN INFORMED POSITION TO SHAPE THE FUTURE OF THINGS IN A CERTAIN DIRECTION. THIS IS THE METHOD AS A RESEARCHER AND AS AN URBANIST ONE CAN AVOID BEING SUPERFICIAL AND SIMPLISTIC BUT GAIN A MORE THOROUGH UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD, TO BE ABLE TO SAY SOMETHING ABOUT IT...
Portfolio: ‘A Linear History of 3 Projects‘ is a retrospective reading of three key projects in relation to each other. They are put in the chronological order in order to illustrate how the ideas and concepts have moved from one project to another and molded a position as a researcher and as an architect. The Masterclass at the Berlage Institute have seeded the initial ideas of synthesizing modes of dealing with information. The Research is an application of these methods on a year long research process and eventually suceeding to create a complex picture of things. The Plan is a large master plan that by using research techniques manages to delve into the complexities of the site and formulates its answer out of that process.
All the materials and documents prepared by Onur Can Tepe and the respective authors of projects whose names are mentioned are copyrighted; the copyright holder is Onur Can Tepe, herein referred to as the ‘author’. Use of the above mentioned materials and documents or any part of them in any way and by any means (including copying, reproduction, publication and revision) without preliminary written consent of the author is prohibited. Any use of the materials and documents without consent of the author is illegal and liable for prosecution under the legislation of the kingdom of the Netherlands. © Copyright 2013.