Architectural Review

Bu yazının izleğini, bugünün Şişli-Beşiktaş’ı arasında bir tampon bölge ve hatta bağlayıcı olarak nitelendirilebilecek Ihlamur Nişantaşı Yolu Sokak ve yakın çevresini (Şişli sınırında Topağacı, Beşiktaş sınırında Ihlamur Kasrı) 1800’lerden bugüne kadar bizlere ulaşan harita(lama)lar ve uçak/uydu görüntüleri üzerinden değerlendirmenin ardından sokak üzerinde konumlanan Daime Apartmanı’na dair açıklayıcı/eleştirel bir yapı analizi ve okuması oluşturacaktır.

a valley, a street, an apartment building: daime.
An evaluation about the Ihlamur Nişantaşı Yolu Street and its surrounding area (Topağacı on Şişli and Ihlamur Pavilion on Beşiktaş borders) where would be characterized as a buffer zone and even connector between Şişli and Beşiktaş provinces through the maps/mappings and aerial/satellite photos in existence from the 1800s to present and afterwards, descriptive/critical building analysis and review regarding Daime Apartment Building that located on this street will constitute the path of this article.

Bu yazıda salt açıklayıcı/eleştirel bir yapı okuması ve analizi yapmanın ötesinde, yüklenici Türkiye Emlak Kredi Bankası'nın yapının inşa edildiği dönemde Türkiye'de toplu konut üretimindeki pozisyonuna, "toplu konut ve çarşı sitesi" projesi için Çankırı'nın seçilmesinin ardındaki dinamiklere ve projenin kentin gelişim ve genişlemesinde üstlendiği role de değinerek, katmanlı bir anlatı, akış izleyeceğim.

// a.k.a. Çankırı Mass Housing and Arcade Complex
This article will constitute a narrative for the complex beyond the classical definitions of “mass housing and arcade” and it will favor a descriptive/critical approach. Thanks to the multi-layered narration and text flow characteristics, I will refer to the position of the Emlak Kredi Bankası (State Bank for Estate and Mortgage Loan) in the mass housing production in Turkey at the time of the planning and construction of this project. Additionally, I will point out the dynamics behind the selection of Çankırı as the site of this complex and the role it played in the evolution and expansion of the city.

It is said that a horizontal line drawn across the center of a canvas is enough to identify an image as a landscape. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a similarly minimal approach was shared by two very different groups of image-makers – some of them working for the English architectural press in the 1950s, others exhibiting as photographic artists in America in the 1970s. Though working decades apart under very different circumstances, both groups were concerned with the way that the concept of landscape was being transformed from a ‘natural’ space into one that was explicitly shaped by human activity.

In 1955, in a special issue of the magazine The Architectural Review, writer Ian Nairn coined the term ‘subtopia’ to describe the banality and isolationism of suburban life. Spreading out unchecked across the countryside, subtopia cloaked the English landscape in an undifferentiated sprawl – an organism with a life of its own, its life-force drawn from the desires of a newly consumer-obsessed middle class.  Nairn’s photographs, and those of many of his contemporaries at The Architectural Review followed a strikingly consistent formula: the bottom half of the image an empty expanse of tarmac, with a scattering of dwellings and a blank sky above.

Twenty years after Nairn’s article appeared, the 1975 New Topographics exhibition put a collection of similarly featureless landscapes before an unsuspecting American public. In image after image of industrial parks, anonymous main streets and housing developments, the gaze is met by empty foregrounds and nondescript architecture – the increasingly ubiquitous infrastructure of the American dream.

Both sets of landscape images failed, quite deliberately, to do what the photograph was conventionally understood to do – to confer upon even the most banal subject matter the status of something more than itself. Though taken at different times and under different circumstances, the subject of these photographs is existential boredom, and boredom is also their mode of reception.