30 Temmuz 2012 Pazartesi

Looking Architecture Philosophically


 LOOKING ARCHITECTURE PHILOSOPHICALLY
Translated by Tugce Aytes

Architecture as an Objectified, Aggressive Object of Ideology
In a place where real environmental culture, that is, built environment and architecture culture do not exist, no other culture placed on strong basis can ever develop. When one paints, she reflects her relationship with environment; when she sculptures, this both reflects her relationship with environment, and creates an event that will take place in environment. When you write a novel or a story, you write the world around and human relationships. Today what we call culture takes place unavoidably inside spaces. There can be no development free of space. When matters belonging to the space have no intelligence and conscience, others remain as totally idle, disconnected, inconsistent attempts. They do not contain the integrity of meaning and cannot have a common ground. This is one of the main reasons of the misery of architecture in 20th century.”1

Objective
The objective of my paper is to analyze the philosophical grounds that today’s architecture environment depends on via Turkey, which makes a particular effort to integrate with day by day globalizing world, and to offer new perspectives to the ones who want to know generally Architecture, particularly Turkish Architecture and economical-sociopolitical structure via architecture. But the main reason is to share my study as the post graduate thesis which I could hand over last year after 15 years.

Introduction
The space where the object of architecture settles and the ideological attitude which they create together cannot be reduced to function; it has dimensions that go beyond the function and gains meaning through the integration with its habitat. Architectural object integrates with the space at the background and with life to get its identity, and it penetrates human consciousness to be permanent. Power is the fundamental devise which recreates the space and gives it a meaning in respect to being the power of dominant ideology. As the ideology which went from virtuality to actuality, power uses a lot of devices in the process of reproducing and shaping urban living spaces and de facto life and the subjects of life; architecture bears a different existence in terms of being a devise in the silhouette that relatively cannot be changed. The habitat of life is the fundamental background which ideology keeps itself alive and recreates itself. Life gains existence as the dialectical relationship between the background and objects. The architectural object and recreated space are the habitat of the ideology, the main structure which the ideology via power objectifies and legitimizes itself as an aesthetical object. Space has a visible identity in that it is a habitat of the culture which the power realizes and objectifies with various devices. As we come closer from 1980’s to now, this visibility has reached to the extent of display, and today it has reached to an extent beyond display.
Human beings and communities objectify their life styles and the ways they conceive life with various devices; for this reason, it can be claimed that every attitude is ideological. Ideological attitude blends with concepts of “power” and “identity”; in architectural structure, aesthetical is added beside function and solidity/durability; the existence of a mental world which architectural structures that become three dimensional and transform into a permanent being rest upon is obvious. The purpose of this paper is to take some structures in today’s Turkish architecture as fundamental and to look philosophically to the concepts of “power”, “identity”, “aesthetics”, “functionality” etc which objectify in structures that become ideological objects. In other words, I will try to look philosophically to architecture where mental world gains three dimensions and becomes concrete.
There is no matter, fact or institution that philosophy does not lie at the bottom when grubbed up. It is said that an analysis without philosophy is condemned to remain artificial. An analysis that rests on an understanding with philosophical profoundness is distinct from similar attempts in terms of depth. Philosophy is the structure of architecture, because the existence of an understanding that is a ground for every human endeavor is the fact. When you take the structure, what remains is not a building but a heap; there we can only talk about a pile that came together but has no cement. If the philosophical grounds of today’s Turkish architecture -if there is still such an architecture; “Turkish Architecture” is a problematic statement; though, this matter is problematic when we describe not only Turkish architecture but also the architecture of any other country- are exposed, I think in this way we will have the opportunity to see the concepts that are the fundamentals for the “world” we live in terms of ontology.

In the globalization which can also be called the mobilization of knowledge, all actors -whether individual or institutional- are constantly in motion. In this process, knowledge moves with not only its content but also with its form, and is taken from the place it is produced and goes more than one place. Dialectics enriches and accelerates this process. An architectural structure’s place can be understood neither from its architect, nor from its material or its style. When a photograph of an architectural structure is taken and when the sample is shown to individuals/subjects who has either an international identity or has not/could not have yet been abroad -now, nobody has to go abroad, what a great paradox- the top 10 cities will probably be the ones with a good PR and those which are important cities of the world in terms of history, politics, culture and economics. What is interesting is that the cities mentioned today are not mentioned on the basis of photograph(s); they are mentioned because they are known for other reasons. This can be a plaza, a campus, a hospital and also, a hotel, a school, a dwelling, a metro station, a museum or an art gallery.
Topography, silhouette, climate, sociology, historical roots, local references, etc are usually left out of parenthesis. This is a kind of fact of being identical/being made identical that a fascistic totalitarian understanding lies beneath and its dimensions should be argued with a rooted perspective of action.
Lately, Iranian Cinema arouses interest especially in the intellectual community, because its language is different: the subjects it discusses, especially the background behind the subject. However, most other cinemas have the same subjects and backgrounds; they are either a follow-up or a trailer of each other. Yet in the middle of last century, Adorno stated with the concept of “culture industry” that every work of “art” is a copy, a repetition of the other. According to Adorno, the subject is reified. Today’s architectural structures are also reified. Their originalities are not in question any more. What gains favor is the one that is different; a pursuit of dissimilarity empty inside. Human consciousness, which stays in the course of being the same with each other in terms of spirit, morality and world view, reacts as “I want mine to be different!” that seems to be a childish, naive reaction to becoming mentally the same; however, human kind feels desire to new realms of independence with its constricted and compressed consciousness. There is a demand for difference that is increasingly becoming a norm but where is this difference? As long as it is different, there is no importance of form, size, verticality, horizontality, material and so on. Difference depends on an existence of a particular norm; without norm a difference of something is beyond speech; then no architectural product -no architectural product produced- is different and cannot be different! Because they are not surprising. People of today have forgotten the humanistic feeling of surprise; it is not in their ontology anymore; for this reason, it is not found in epistemological approaches towards today’s people, how soever deep archaeologies are done. Modernity and post modernity are facts that transcend modernism and postmodernism. I believe that we need to understand the fact of architecture, which hems around our era, 24 hours we breathe in, in other words our entire life, in the light of variables we cannot see by naked eye and do not/cannot consider sufficiently.

Method
Architectural structure will not be discussed by being separated from the culture it is in; the physical, socio-cultural habitat it is in and philosophical habitat, plans, silhouettes, offers it brings to the need, specialties, references it gives or does not give as basis etc. with the ontology which Hartmann conceptualized with Geistic layer. Philosopicritics of structures will be done through the concepts detected in the Geistic layer of the architectural structure. Philosophicritics I conceptualized as a kind of architectural critics lies on an interdisciplinary ground and one of its acknowledgements is that architecture is not self-appointed but is one of the constant actors of the habitat in broad sense.

Scope
The buildings that are going to be read philosophically will be selected from different kinds of buildings and will be made up of limited number of examples; in my thesis, I had determined a sample I thought to reflect Turkey generally and I tried to do philpsophicritics of 9 buildings. Here, because of time pressure and “fund”, I will share four of them. Ipekyol Tekstil (Textile), Mercedes Yedek Parça ve Pazarlama (Spare Parts and Marketing), Forum Bornova AVM (Shopping Mall), Tekfen Tower and Turkcell Ar-Ge Binası (R&D Building.)





Buildings
1. İpekyol Tekstil2
1.1. Tag of the Building

Design Team
Assistant Architecture(s)
Ertuğrul Morçöl
Gülseren Gerede Tecim
Architecture Office(s)
Employer
Date of Project
2004 – 2005
Date of Building
2005 – 2006
Field of Lot
20.000 m2
Type of Project
Type of Building
Contractor


1.2. Philosophical Criticism of the Building
With the concepts of “togetherness”, “efficiency”, “observation/being observed”, “maximum benefit from the field”, “functionality” which stands out in this building, the building will be criticized philosophically.

The factory building which is started off the principle of transparence has produced successful solutions which at first sight may be called luxurious for a factory. The reason why the space has a singular structure is, as the architect stated in the information he gave about the building, that they are principally together for the same purpose but they distinguish practically. In the building, the purpose is to create space by intertwining production and administration units. To support the working area of the workers with natural lightly and to do this successfully brings along an interesting. When compared to architectural solutions created by capitalist production devices for the white collars to produce desk jobs, for example, the condition of the workers of Sun Plaza in Maslak, not the ones in the offices at -4 but on the floors cannot be compared with the workers in line at Ipekyol Tekstil Fabrikasi.

The production of the building with a combination of concrete, steel and glass and the nearly concealment of concrete shows that Turkey is inside today’s architectural world with this building; what is more important is that it shows architecture is still in a search of structure in a sense not different from a new millennium and has not yet find it. The idea of “a little bit from this, a little bit from that” still goes on also at the buildings that are deemed successful or we deem successful.

The building can be stated as a production of the culture industry generally in a sense; it is a trial of architectural solution confined to one of the present languages. It repeats the status quo in relational sense: Here, the relationship between power and knowledge is established very tightly. The factory building with its front, its place of production and its dining hall refers that force or power is also in the real economy as a kind of capital.

Space is made functional and is brought to the actor position of production process successfully. Work places and rest areas are built in accessible sizes, minding comfort in terms of human measures. Beyond realizing its purpose in teleological sense, it carries aesthetical claims unexpected from a factory building.


2. Mercedes-Benz Building3


2.1. Tag of Building4

Design Team
Turgut Alton
Oya Ökmen
Hüseyin Turan
Fatma Kahraman
Assistant Architect(s)
Renan Coşgun
Deniz Duru
Architecture Office(s)
Employer
Date of Project
1997 – 2000
Date of Production
1998 – 2001
Field of Lot
182.058 m2
Closed Area
41.572 m2
Type of Project
multipurpose, administration, depot


2.2. Philosophical Criticism of the Building
With the concepts of identity that is expected to bear Geistic elements objectified in structure, “local and international references”, “togetherness of different functions”, “hierarchical solution”, the structure will be criticized philosophically.

The architectural building whose references are local and North European arouses interest at first sight with facing that is made up of bricks. In the statement of the architect, the attempt to establish a relation between the identity of Mercedes and the identity of the building through bricks causes us to rethink about “identity”. Can a relationship between the identity of the building and the brand inside or the identity of the company, or can “such” a relationship be established? The identity of the company is in making the buildings talk. In the past, it was holy books and kings which were talked about, but now it is the brands. Our new gods are brands. Nowadays, when the corporate identity is glorified and is put under protection to an extent like prostration, architecture, too, is becoming an ideological devise of the capital and is drawn out.

In a hierarchical structure but a right hierarchical structure, thinking functions of different masses is also a reference to the life getting more and more complicated every day. In architectural sense, it has tried to establish its relationship with the geography it is in through some references in the interior space but this has not gone beyond the kitsch. The building exposes itself more with its exteriors, and it is beyond speech that the building which may be thought to exist in relatively rich cities of the Netherlands and Germany establishes a bond with the territory it is present in terms of silhouette, form and building material.

The building is constituted hierarchically, considering relationships of produced spaces and the units it houses with each other and with outside. The building which keeps human measures with its humble glory that is almost monumental establishes its relationship with the human kind carefully. In teleological terms, it realizes its purpose and is also given a try to be aesthesized with local and international references.

3. Forum-Bornova5
3.1. Tag of Building6

Design Team
Çiğdem Duman
Ertun Hızıroğlu
Assistant Architect(s)
İlkay Kılınç
Süreyya Önver
İlhan Devrim
Sevil Özbayburtlu
Architecture Office(s)
Employer
Date of Project
2005 – 2006
Date of Building
2005 – 2006
Field of Lot
200.000 m2
Closed Area
70.000 m2
Type of Project
Type of Building


3.2. Philosophical Criticism of the Building
With the concepts of “artificiality”, “to gain permanence over figurativeness”, “being culturally isolated”, “accessibility”, “consumption as a form of happiness and/or single form of happiness”, the building will be criticized philosophically.

The air of Las Vegas in all shopping malls is present in Forum-Bornova, though it is a very successful example. The shopping mall which is claimed to be done inspired from Mediterranean towns is an artificial “city”, a largish street of a city or a town. The building is designed as a group of buildings and is built by integrating buildings with different characters according to their functions, creating a homogeneous texture and somehow referring to the relatively homogeneous structure of the town but also to heterogeneous structure of the Mediterranean. The tower in the building, as in Koc University, can be explained by stating a kind of figurativeness, monumentality, a need for being remembered with something, etc. Unlike the similar ones, this little street does not close its face to outside but, as a building relatively outside the city, closes to the city the privileges it opened to exclusive people. This liberalizes the fact of shopping and the socializing around it for a particular class and accordingly deepens the sense of this social and cultural isolation. A similar one was opened with the name Istinye Park and also in this shopping mall as a utopia where Turkey’s and the world’s most prestigious brands came together, there is a nostalgic Bazaar. Those bazaars which can be found in Kadikoy and many other neighborhoods are equalized by capitalism to building a zoo in a wild forest and accepting visitors with tickets. Shopping malls are today’s isolated agoras and a kind of utopia. You go in there searched by the security and this is the message given to the consumer that s/he is safe and now the possible ground for consumption is created. Forum-Bornova is in itself accessible for people of every age and is in humanistic measures. Perhaps the most of its criticalness is its humanness. In Forum-Bornova, unlike other shopping malls, there is not a harsh aggressiveness in the form of monumentality, challenging, oppressing, leaving powerless and demand for more consumption in order to free from powerlessness, but its category is still shopping mall. Now, everything is ready for our consumption. Creating the possible ground for consumption, shopping malls are central places for a kind of therapy, of rehabilitation. The one who comes to shopping malls is someone who can get his/her share from the created benefit and can participate in the world, in the life. And the condition for participation is to buy, not to look. Credit cards have taken the place of psychological medicament, that is, the green prescription; however, both of them have a lot of things in common, to begin with, overdose. To buy more and more and more, and in the end, an addiction which develops after a relative duration. In other words, the vanity of the need for feeding the metaphysical soul with a physical being.





4. Tekfen Tower7
4.1. Yapının Künyesi8
Tekfen Kulesi (Tekfen Tower)
Place: Levent, Istanbul, Turkey
Total Area of Construction: 71.270 m2
Area Used: 33,000m²
Date of Construction: 24 September 2001
Employer: Tefken Holding
Architect: 'Swanke Hayden Connell' Architects
Technical Data
Height: 118 meters
Number of Floors: 28
4.2. Philosophical Criticism of the Building
The building will be analyzed with the concepts of “anti-locality”, “monumentality”, “richness”, “exclusiveness”, “nobility” and “talking architecture”

Tekfen Tower Plaza talks. It is an architecture that talks. It talks, but its “sound” is no doubt different; what talks in this building is transatlantic; it makes itself heard from New York; to make itself heard, it raises its voice. Its relatively plain, minimalist state compared to plazas in Maslak takes the function of raising its voice more and more. With its elegancy, newness, richness, elements of color, material, roof that represent nobility, etc, it lives the schizophrenia of belonging here and not belonging here. The summer residence which is put above the building like a hat and is aesthetized with its sun blinds that create the impression to have been copied from somewhere and glued. The building is just like an administrator of Turkish origin, who had his/her secondary and high education in America, after probation and a while of work experience, come to Turkey with a broken Turkish and works at a branch office of a company. What are Turkish in the administrator in question are the language, though broken, and the name; what are peculiar to the place where Tekfen Tower breathes are the area it occupies and its place in the city silhouette and a part of its name. The building establishing no relationship with the geography it is in, except the indirect references the hat above obtains with sun blinds. But it establishes relationship with the environment it is in. Buyukdere Street is Voyvoda (Bankalar) Street, which was reconstructed in 1980’s. The dynamics of the buildings rising at Voyvoda Street 100 years ago are the same dynamics rising today at Buyukdere Street and Maslak.

In the second half of 20th century, with the focus to shift from Europe to America, the power focus shifted to the USA. USA and others became references not only politically, economically and culturally but also architecturally. To buy the values USA produces is considered to catch the era in a sense and to live with it simultaneously.

5. Turkcell AR-GE Building9

5.1. Tag of Building10

Design Team
Assistant Architect(s)
Okan Bayık
Romain Cadoux
Işık Sungu
Barış Yüksel
Türkan Yılmaz
Architecture Office(s)
Date of Project
2007 - 2008
Date of Construction
2007 - 2008
Field of Lot
86.000 m2
Closed Area
8.100 m2
Type of Project
R&D Building
Type of Building


5.2. Philosophical Criticism of the Building
With the concepts of “new sanctuaries: R&D”, “new God: knowledge, work home” 11, “watching life”, “aquarium” that objectify in the building, it will be criticized philosophically.

The entrance of the building is like the isolation of a temple, as if referring to the temples in pagan era. Taking you inside and getting you lost, it looks like it is close to the outside (the life). Today new temples are R&D and “knowledge” produced here are the gods. R&D’s are one of the strongest coalitions that government establishes with the capital, the intellectual and the public (because they need work and they are told that new areas of work will emerge with the novelties) and they have immunity. Eastern front has no reference to the western front which is the entrance of the building, in terms of style, structure or material. Eastern front is actualized by using fundamentally a transparent design which takes the maximum benefit from the brightness, the light. The harmony they derived with the help glass and steel and new technologies in 2000’s extended areas of usage and also created transparency. The front structure and the facing which are always problematic in terms of architecture can be solved by these “wonder duo” smoothly. Transparency, if it is an office, puts the outside and the inside in the same state. That the building is softly reduced from the front and is pulled back, made it stronger, underlined its limits more and in the name of breaking the rigidity and monotonousness of the front surface, horizontal jetties are given backgrounds. The contact of the building again with the ground on the eastern front is a kind of reference to its transparency; the life watched from above, the land which begins on the border of the first floor and made tangible with the opening window is again an object of follow-up. It is an attempt to establish a bond, but it cannot escape creating the metaphor of aquarium. In the office, every kind of comfort for the employees is regarded. Because there is a 24 hour shift. Here, efficiency is grounded upon. Efficiency is reduced to the created benefit. The human being is considered as a machine and taking the trendy human description as basis, things a human being may need in life are determined with a couple of wits like fitness, billiard, climbing wall, etc. The white collar began to bring work to home in 1960’s and the hours of work gradually increased; now, a radical “solution” is found for this. After transforming the home into office, transforming offices into buildings that contain private places is also an alternative offered to work and working spaces. As long as the main concern is efficiency and it is directly proportional to the hours of work, the work and the home which one lives his/her private life are going to integrate and privacy will be erased again. In architectural sense, although this building which new understandings dominate in structural, material and designed means creates a difference in style; it is obvious that it does not even establish a little bond with the geography it stands in.

Conclusion
When you look at architectural buildings, you can see they are entirely disconnected from where they are positioned and are reckless of that place; it is possible to see this in every geography in the word, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, at Dubai Towers in Dubai which opened in January 2010, as well as the example of Pompidou in Paris. Everything is considered in their own individuality. The ultimate point of the individualistic world view to separate capitalism into compartments and to keep it off from being a danger isolates buildings, too. From makeshift postures of buildings that are so alien to itself and its environment, a city can rise, but it is open to question whether this is humane or not. This fact is stated, in the book titled Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Adorno and Horkheimer wrote together, just as “the magician during the ceremony starts with isolating the place where the holy powers should be present from the environment, every work of art separates its environment from the real. It holds the magical heritage tighter which has given up affecting the nature in a way that separates art from the magical sympathy.”12 Every individual is holy now, s/he has individual immunity. And so has the buildings. There are rights protected by law. Life is designed in freedom and stands within it. Having considered the dialectic between “the new” and “the constant”, the now and here of it, the essence of the work which is put in parenthesis with phenomenological method, here the architectural building, can be exposed. In Hartmannian words, we can focus on the irreal sphere. This is also reaching the philosophy in architecture.

In this context, considering N. Hartmann’s New Ontology, when we look at plazas, apartment blocks, mass produced separate houses of today’s architecture, it introduces, if stated more sharply, buildings which lack expression like human beings with carved eyes and without the Geistic layer-irreal layer, in other words, places without “roof”s. This study particularly focuses on the irreal territory in Hartmannian ontology and takes it as the basis. In architecture, when one of the classical discourses of 20th century architecture, “Form follows function”, is considered in this way, the judgment seems to be challengeable, because form has a meaning even beyond function. Human being creates form in Geistic sense; form is objectified the subject who brings it into existence. Urban identity appears when forms integrate. Urban spaces continue their existences as produced, constituted, reproduced spaces. City is the sum of forever living spaces. Neither the architectural structure is formed with the integration of a couple of spaces nor cities form with the organization of spaces. Just like the product of architecture has a Geistic layer, cities do have a Geistic layer, too; this is the urban texture; this is the sum of the properties that separate Istanbul from Mardin, Kars from Mugla.13

Architectural work is also an aesthetical object. That architecture has a meaning beyond function makes it a “value” by itself; the process of production and life of an architectural structure is an ethical fact, because it shapes the human “ethos”, and this gives it an ideological identity. Architectural language cannot escape being a part of the daily language and the mental world as well as being dependent on the “Zeitgeist”. Mental world objectifies inevitably in the mental world. Regarded as European centered, it would not be far from the fact to say that architecture which was under service of the Pope has today transformed into the ideological device of the capital. It can be claimed that structures which are built considering concepts like size, difference, luxury, etc, whether horizontal or vertical, are a kind of “orgasmic disorder”, an identity based orgasmic disorder. Do not antidepressants and pleasure culture nurture from this disorder?

Proposal
First of all, instead of inhabitants, the administration of the city, especially the processes of the actualization of project that will change the silhouette and economical and social texture should be democratisized. Areas to be opened new habitation should be a result of a democratic process with the participation of all parties of the subject in terms of natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, etc and urban sociology economy, traffic, urban organization and urban traditions, and be determined by the common sense. One of the implicit purposes of my study is to provide participation of the inhabitants to the processes related to urbanization and to contribute the beginning of political sensitivity in order to form its law.

V. Metin Bayrak
Philosopher
1 CANSEVER, T. (1997). Kubbeyi Yere Koymamak. İstanbul: İz Yayıncılık, p. 88.
2 BAYRAK, M. Günümüz Türk Mimarisine Felsefeyle Bakmak, Yayımlanmamış Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Hacettepe Üniversitesi, 2010, p. 134–141
3 BAYRAK, M. Günümüz Türk Mimarisine Felsefeyle Bakmak, Yayımlanmamış Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Hacettepe Üniversitesi, 2010, p. 150–155
5 BAYRAK, M. Günümüz Türk Mimarisine Felsefeyle Bakmak, Yayımlanmamış Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Hacettepe Üniversitesi, 2010, p. 163–167
7 BAYRAK, M. Günümüz Türk Mimarisine Felsefeyle Bakmak, Yayımlanmamış Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Hacettepe Üniversitesi, 2010, p. 176–180
9 BAYRAK, M. Günümüz Türk Mimarisine Felsefeyle Bakmak, Yayımlanmamış Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Hacettepe Üniversitesi, 2010, p. 181–186
11 Offices which are derived from the concepts of work and home and where some services that can be bought or found from houses, hotels or social facilities in the name of legitimizing ever increasing hours of work are offered.
12 ADORNO, T.W. – HORKHEİMER, M. (1995). Dialectic of Enlightment. Trans. Gunselin Schmid Noerr and Edmund Jephcott, Stanford University Press, 2007.
13 BAYRAK, M. Günümüz Türk Mimarisine Felsefeyle Bakmak, Yayımlanmamış Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Hacettepe Üniversitesi, 2010, s. 191–193

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