The Screen

The project focuses on a more effective political and social participation of youth. Aim of the project is expanding the political and economic fields of young people by productions and sharings of media. Therefore, I proposed a mixed used media complex. Through the process, I also studied how architects should approach the difficulties on the site.

The project consists of open & closed offices, meeting rooms, recreation, play and free work spaces, photo/music/recording/radio studios, library, gathering and activity areas, public courtyard, restaurant, recreation terraces. Young people from different parties strengthen their political and economic participation by coming together on a platform to create an ecosystem on a sharing ground by producing and sharing media. The design tries to be attached to the urban texture and its context with massive fragments as well as maintaining both pedestrian permeability and visual rhythm along the street facades. Inner courtyard and amphitheater create a public interface spaces as an extension of the street at openings between proposed buildings. These spaces between the design and the city gave the project its name "screen", as a screen being an interface of the media. The facades, part of these interfaces, are designed as a composition of formal differences without uniformization just like young people from various backgrounds working and sharing with each other in the same space. Throughout the design process the project investigated the answers of the following questions: Can the program of architecture be implemented while the existing living trees are preserved on their location? Is architecture that both meets the requirements and reveres the living trees possible? How can random and irregular factors come together with architecture? The design approach was not seeing the site challenges as a problem, but accepting them as the solution. For that reason, the trees on the land were considered as an input in the shaping of the design mass. In summary, it is concluded that the obstacles in the site do not limit, but rather diversify the design. Encountered existing factors should be included in the process and the design can be enriched with them. Ignoring this diversity and making the design a standardized gap with large scale environmental destructive interventions either takes architecture to uniformity or turns it into just a self-referencing kitsch object.