FUTURE SECTION OF THE SITE

FINAL DRAWINGS

HISTORY, SIMILAR SITES AND CORE EXPANSION

STRATEGY_MAPS_timeline

diagram of expansion through development cores

"materiality" map of Fener-Balat

DIY constructions in the real environment

RENEW NEWCASTLE DIY PROJECT

http://vimeo.com/15759471

timeline and stages of intervention

We are identifying the condition of the buildings in our region, spotting the empty lots and the empty interiors so that we know where we can place our intervention. In a selected area we are “scanning” the houses, so to have a clear view of the total living condition of the region. We are:

1. transforming vans, vending machines or containers found in the site so that they can be used to host people or activities,

2. re-making the empty interiors and in some cases extending (altering the wooden structure of the houses) them towards an empty lot or a street or merging two nearby buildings,

3. And newly creating shapes and forms out of reusedmaterial mentioned above that will successfully accompany our other interventions.

The structures we are creating are either fixed (case 2 from the above) or mobile (case 1) and they can be used as residences, workspaces or public spaces.

In our attempt to show this we created this diagram which is actually an evolution of our previous manual. In this diagram we want to show the timeline of our intervention taking into consideration incoming population percentages, time people tend to spend in the region, salary, education levels and employment. Currently it goes up to 18 months and describes three basic stages of our intervention.

STAGES

Stage01: 1-3 months

Vans, containers and trucks occupied by new coming immigrants who also in this period learn a certain local skill which the will be using in the next stage.

Stage 02: 4-9 months

During this stage the vans and trucks became vacant from the previous inhabitants and so that the circle can continue. Previous inhabitants start using the skill they have learned in order to make extensions on the existing wooden houses and new constructions on their rooftops or the ground level gaps.

Stage 03: 9 -18 months

Those constructions are being used, so people start to make some profit out of them. Also public spaces start to be more organised and active as a whole. They are mainly consisted of the urban elements as defined in our initial glossary.

e.g. immigrants start running some of those new spaces as workshops

Owners are able of renting those new spaces

Public spaces can be operated by the municipality

We always bear in mind that we aim to sustain the local character and identity of Fener so we are about to establish some borders to our mechanism so that we will ensure that our intervention wont damage the historical aspect of the area. We also want extend our timeline to 10 or 20 years so that we can establish our attitude towards such interventions in historically preserved areas.

layering information

Our objective is to compose the mechanism in which we can establish small interventions inside the existing buildings or in the in-between spaces. We intend to base our overall design proposal on a self-sustained mechanism. This mechanism will be consisted of a number of interrelated factors that will be defined by specific social, economic and structural rules.

Our approach is bottom up. We are using two base drawings, section and plan, in which we intend to layer all the information that came out of our research. This information will include:

·        Social networks

·         Ethnicity

·         Materiality of the structure

·         Levels of decay

·         Vacancy of the houses

·         Demographics

·         Uses

re_constructing experiment

The first experiment is based on the final stage of the deconstruction process of the frames. Starting from this point, we expanded some parts of the frames so to bridge the gap between the buildings and then started to create spaces in all the three levels by relocating the possible structures that derive from the bay windows.

attempts with surfaces, volumes and frames

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. 

deconstruction process of houses

manual guide for current and newcoming population

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.

characters and story line of a block

land uses of selected streets

house x-ray and volume transformation

land use and social activity

Fictional space

A first attempt of creating fictional reused space, mostly giving a feeling of how the quality of those empty or unused spaces can be designed.

Spatial analysis_Fener-Tarlabasi

We analyzed both areas 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. We noticed that the majority of those unused empty spaces are spotted along a main route in both areas. So we decided to focus on each of those routes. We started with Fener and made some models to explore the most dense part in wooden and ruined buildings of the route, we tried different scales to get varied feedback both about the relation of public space and built volumes. And then be able to practice our urban experiment.

Network of uses_initial propositions

Our aim is to revive those areas, in such a way so to sustain their historical and social identity as well as the current population. Our proposal is about reusing local material and also involving the inhabitants to a revitalizing process of the regions. The new constructions and public space will be influenced by the typologies of the old timber houses, which represent the heritage of the area. There are quite a few houses in both the sites that are almost completely demolished, retaining just some parts of their skeleton, in those relic places, we see a free space network that can be reused and turn into new key spaces of the regions that will provide the opportunity to a gradual revival.   Those spaces can be reused either as urban public space, new housing mobile units and various local activities that can enhance the local economy. The material we are willing to use is mainly timber, because wood exists in abundance in Istanbul and also is a rather “smart” material to use for this geographic area since it experiences frequent earthquakes.

We want to involve the inhabitants to a reviving process, which will hold its own rules but also have a great flexibility. Temporal- mobile houses will be provided to the immigrants which will be placed on some of those in between spaces (ruins) or even on rooftops. The immigrants won’t be able to live in those shells indefinitely; 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. In exchange of his work, an existing derelict house will be granted to him. He will be able to make this house viable again, since he will by then have gained both knowledge and experience. Apart from housing, our project has a clear urban purpose, so in our detected free/derelict spaces, we will place vegetable gardens promoting the local production and economy, playgrounds for children, public mingle spaces and thematic sheds on the rooftops boosting the areas identity. In that way we are hoping that a gradual and mild “regeneration” will take place in the regions, sustaining its current population and identity and in the same time provide certain skills to people who have the need and will to know but lack the opportunity.

Studying the typologies

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.
We have noticed the importance of both physical and conceptual connection between the windows and the urban space. This is either by material (rope, basket) as mentioned above, or by people’s communication. So we made a quick diagram indicating the connections between our free space and the surrounding windows as an additional urban layer. 

"Glossary"

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.

The first table is about the elements that can be found within the urban public space of Fener and Tarlabasi and the second one is about the ones concerning the private space. (housing)

TYPOLOGIES (2)