from edge to border - a concrete landscape

from edge to border - a concrete landscape is a project realized by Alejandro Elias Garcia Marta in TU Delft for his Msc theses (urbanism: spacelab, architecture: border condition) in 2008. It takes place in Istanbul (Turkey).

The starting inquiry revolves around the question on how to visualize and conceptualize urban processes? How can we go to an unknown city, without a pre-given idea of the actual urban field, and produce an insightful observation about the forces operating in space? Thus, a conscious rejection of preconceived ideas about the city of Istanbul was the first starting condition of the research leading to the question of how spatial strategies and tactics get perform around the territorial movement structures of the city? What do they produce? How can we represent such a non-linear series of events?





By looking at spatial practices from different angles and through different magnitudes of scales the research analyses the relationship of the highway network and its in-between spaces. Through the use of various mapping techniques (maps, photographs, diaporamas, videos, diagrams, collages, etc) different urban sequences of changes over time were visualized. Thereafter, a classification of various degrees of material accumulation, movement intensity, and spatial experience gave the necessary insights for the area.
Focusing on the old city center at its north area (Fatih neighborhood), the site revealed itself as an edge. Here, the natural energy of the territory dies out, and an experience of limit invades the zone. Even though marginal groups still appropriated the area, a lack of continuity of these tactical event spaces was very present. Thus, the idea of the intervention is to turn this edge into a permeable border, by reassembling a space for the meeting of differences.


Istanbul step analyses XL


Istanbul XL voids along the highways


Istanbul XL voids and urban growth


Istanbul XL voids and programms



Istanbul XL voids and tactics


Fatih niches



Fatih niche G


Fatih spatial analyses


Fatih introverted centrality



Fatih sound maps




neigbourhood strategy


programming


urban plan




How can we inscribe a building into a zone of conflicting forces? How can we avoid any kind of platonic generic intervention in an area that revealed very specific issues and conflicts in contemporary Istanbul? Thus the building itself, part of a larger strategy for this edge zone, revolves around the idea of a landscape by taking its meaning as a cultural artifact, in the sense of `nature’ as a man-made concept. Usually a landscape performs as tactical territory, in the sense of us not being able to keep it, or capitalize over the space. It is there for us to appropriate, but it resists any kind long term colonization, except if you construct a building, a container, but then it stops being a landscape and becomes a landscape with a building. Therefore this building may be understood in the context of a “natural-cultural” piece of territory that has been shaped and manipulated by the human hand in order to be domesticated for its inhabitation. This concrete landscape creates a bridge between strategic capitalization of border zones of the highway, and its actual spatial tactical practices. It engages flexible and informal social substances of the city, but at the same time capitalizes over them as a tactical event space. A completely open space, a permeable system of voids and matter facilitates spatial tactical practices by marginal groups (homeless, alcoholics, urban farmers, etc.).



The assemblage of the building started from the reorganization of time-event diagrams into sectional structures. These unfold into landscape-surfaces which correlated with the idea of a tactical event space. The translation into MAYA allows for further domestication for human colonization, thus bringing chaos into order: giving to space the quality of time (heterogeneity).






mapping and translation

The architecture of the invisible projects virtual concrete matter into the space, articulating the hard with the soft, the flexible with the rigid, through a brutalist architectonic manifestation, as reality itself. This poetic open space does not possess clear boundaries between the strategic and the tactical, but on the contrary blurs these borders in order to induce the encounter of differences. This building of wonder and refuge poses the same as different. Is this a park? Is this a building? Is this a shelter? Is this a Landscape?



















Alejandro Elias Garcia Marta, is an Architect and Urbanist graduated with honors from TUDelft(2008), the Netherlands. He is interested in questions regarding the permeability between the fields of Art, Architecture, Technology, and Urban Space. He currently works and live in Paris.