Design Portfolio_MArch UD 2010-11/ The Bartlett_UCL
Louisa Varelidi/ Stella Papazoglou
Our site is Fener, its an identical area located at the historical peninsula. Fener inhabitants used to be Greeks and Armenians who also held the main construction activity in the city both for concrete and wooden houses; as a result the area is rich in historical buildings mainly out of timber which after the 1940s were abandoned or demolished, becoming mainly immigrant’s residences. The currents situation is a derelict area with lots of ruined and abandoned buildings but with a strong social bonding.
There is a regeneration planned that aim to demolish all the building stock, preserving only the facades and reconstructing the whole areas in a “look- alike� way. The Anatolian- immigrant residents will be forced to leave, so that the urban regeneration will be followed by a social one, turning Fener into the new trendy areas of Istanbul.
The first impression of Istanbul . . . . .
Documentation_Through our first visit at Fener we documented various elements and materials that are adapted to the social and urban texture of the sites. It is quite obvious that the actual method the inhabitants use to produce space, to decorate the existing space and to enhance public space is giving different uses and social meanings to local, cheap everyday elements. This is part of the amazing mobility and constant interaction between the inhabitants, which characterizes both areas and which is one of the things we aim to maintain and promote. For example, people just used a wooden fruit box, facing backwards to create a coffee table or a combination of tires, canvas sacks and barrels to make stands for the street markets. Even the hanging baskets that can be found at the streets of those areas nave a meaning, it’s a local media of connection between the balconies as the locals use them to exchange various things without moving out of their houses. Those are just a few examples of the urban informality those people are experiencing, which is an extension of their culture and their reality. Fener own much of their vibrancy and heterogeneity to those unprogrammed spaces, it create a blank canvas for the citizens and their activities. It gives the neighborhood an enviable diversity and a characteristic locality through the many unplanned, temporary meeting places for a rich mix of social and ethnic groups.
Identifying the local patchwork urban character of the area.
These collages are an initial try to show the complexity of those areas in terms of this self-organized urban space. Firstly, experimenting with the existing situation and how the local materials are incorporated into their environment and after with which way we can propose some new spaces that adapt the characteristic locality and incorporate more elements depending on their meaning as it has been defined at our glossary.
Housing
Through our documentations and initial propositions we are dealing with finding ways to boost this informal urbanism while upgrading their standards of living. We want to use this patchwork identity in our design proposal defining specific uses in new public or private spaces located as a network that derive from the derelict spaces we have detected in both sites. We started by creating a glossary containing all those elements found within the urban space of the two sites and categorize them by their meaning spatially and socially. The main reason for this action is that we want to have a main “vocabulary� to use in our design proposal, each element, based on its meaning, will be translated in a new architectural or urban element and incorporated into our proposal so that the locality of the place can be kept alive and even enhanced.
Public space
Some first attempts of creating fictional reused space, mostly giving a feeling of how the quality of those empty or unused spaces can be designed through the re-use of local elements.
Mapping Fener
We analyzed Fener at a large scale so that we can define the urban and social grid, the housing patterns and the different kind of building stock as well as where the ruins and the urban gaps are located. Through this process we concluded in identifying networks of free space, which are consisted by in-between spaces, ruined buildings, rooftops and empty sites. At the same time we realized through a mapping of the social uses that the is also a network of commerce that runs through fener. We decided to zoom in a specific part of Fener as it appears to be the more dense part in timber houses and ruins and also to be part of the commercial network but not the stronger one. So it is a part of the area that has a lot of derelict spaces and also needs an enhance in uses comparing to the rest of the commerce network.
modeling the site
Social uses and networks
A very crucial aspect of our proposal is sustaining and promoting the locality of the region. A typical land use analysis would not work for us, therefore we tried to go a step further and make a more detailed and complex analysis of our selected area in Fener. Based on the land uses of the area, a number of videos we have seen, articles we have read and also talks we had with some locals, we zoomed in to a certain block and created scenarios of the people occupying this space. We tried to personalize our site so that our design can really be based on people’s’ current and potential needs. Every character can be seen as a player and every action can change the social network and as a consequence the needs of the neighborhood. The houses can be expanded and newcomers can be located in the inbetween spaces but always in response to the social network of the block. The construction are going to have a temporary character as the newcomers won’t be able to stay forever. They will have a specific timeline in which they should vacate the space. During this period, the immigrant will have the opportunity to gain some knowledge on specific crafts and especially to the timber construction so that he will be able to work on the maintenance of the area’s building stock.
Informal street uses during 24 hours around the block
Before we place ourselves in the actual environmet , we tried creating a manual which will guide us through the complexity of the site. We divided the population into the current and the new coming, giving potentials for covering their housing, work space and public needs. Depending on the case, we will choose the material to be used from our previous glossary.
One of the things we noticed at Tarlabasi during our first visit was the rope they use to hang their laundry, the rope is tied to two houses, this way it creates a visible connection between the two bay windows, and this activity is about communicating and exchanging news and information. We made this model to express how a spatial element can express a social networking within the urban space.
As the existence of timber houses is very identical for the area, we want our design proposal to be influenced by their typologies and construction methods. Our concept is based on the reuse of locality, but not only in terms of the materials and social identity, but also in terms of the actual structure of the old houses in Fener and Tarlabasi and the volumes out of which they are comprised. We selected some usual typologies that can be found in both areas and made an analysis of them in order to understand the way they are constructed and also the differences between the houses that at a first glance really look alike. Also we catecorized the different volumes of the bay windows as we noticed there is a great variety of those elements which initialy seems to be quite repetitive and similar.
After having completed the typologies study, we made small models of certain volumes and experimented with how they can be combined, creating each time different relations between them, and different urban space.
sketching out our first ideas_
references to the use of wood_
Kawamata creates projects which border on installation and architecture, his artistic interventions are focused on urban sites. Despite that fact, his work is not limited to an architectural study, on the contrary he really gets involved with the social aspect of the regions he is working on. Usually he produces models and in situ installations using wood. The “Favela Plan� is a study of the architectural forms and typologies of the favela in Sao Paolo.
We have three sets of modeling experiments. The surfaces, where we tried unfolding them in various ways. The interior volumes, where we focused on the shapes, their structural grid, the relation between the overlapping volumes as well as their potential expansions and last the wooden frames which we completely exploded and tried shorts of combinations. All those attempts are not yet place in the environment but are just object experiments. Their aim though is to make us familiar with structural rules, shapes, material and re constructing potentials, so then we can operate with them in the actual environment.
GROUP LINK_ http://stella-louisa-urbanism-of-locality.blogspot.http://stellapastella-urbanexperience.blogspot.com/
CONTACT_ louisa.varelidi@gmail.com stellapapazoglou@gmail.com