ANKARA DIGUISED LANDSCAPES: A WORKSHOP ON MOVING AND SKETCHING
Workshop 2017 | Gülşah Aykaç+Sezin Sarıca
/Double click on the gallery/
Ankara as the capital of Turkey is known to be the city of republican revolution. Thus, historiographic research has been tracing the inventions and discoveries of modern urban planning and modern architecture rooting back to the 1920s. On the other side, Ankara as a piece of Mesopotamian heritage goes more back to the Roman Empire, so it is evident to claim that the city hides its archeological invisible layers – some of which have been remained underground and some of which have been already destructed. But over and above, today’s Ankara has been a place of rapid transformation while politics is dominating the daily life and its spaces violently. Neither this workshop nor this essay aims to point out what has happened in our times. Instead, what we would like to point out is the loss of our socio-spatial interaction, the loss of our bodily contact to the city, and the loss of our connection with the history. Disguised landscapes, in that sense, not only includes the implicit historical and material effect of the spaces of construction and destruction from Roman period to Republican period; but also includes the bodies as alive and responsive becomings. Therefore, we called Ankara as a place of disguised landscapes before the workshop. And we intended to unfold ‘the disguised landscapes’ through walking and sketching.
The generative idea of this workshop also stemmed from a re-action to the technological habits of spatial representation. To elaborate, it could be claimed that architectural production is a process in and through which architects materialize spaces—that is to say built spaces—but much more than that, they produce spatial representations. Whether visual or textual, spatial representations are ideas, proposals, theories and scenarios. Or from a Lefebvrian approach, these representations are an apparatus of the architect to produce and reproduce ideologies and discourses within architecture. The process of spatial representation has two performative faces: the act of researching and the act of representing. These two actions are interlaced parts of a nonlinear production process. Therein, the main problematic arises: how to research and how to represent? It could be claimed that representation starts within the act of researching. The act of researching has become more and more dependent on technological tools since the 1980s and it has disconnected the body from the processes. However since Vitruvius, the body of the architect has inevitably becomes a spatial agent performing in urban spaces. Thus, the act of researching in architecture is a performance pertaining to the body that makes contact with the material existence of urban spaces. This contact may break up research habits and lead to distinctive investigations. With this intention, we moved the space, walked, sketched it. Hereby, the workshop and this booklet represent a collective and performative narrative of Ankara.
Routes | Disguised Landscapes
Route 1. |ULUS | İller Bankası | Ulucanlar | Kale | PirinçHan | Çıkrıkçılar | Meydan
On the first day, the “scape” was the city, history and memory. The route started from the “destroyed” architecture; İller Bankası, and continued towards the Kale Mahallesi where we experienced both the topography of the city and questioned the label of “insecure” and its empty and somehow “glued” meaning. At the end of the route, through which we experienced and documented not only the historical layers of the spaces but also the daily movements of people, we talked about the social, spatial and cultural layers of the view engulfing the Ulus Heykeli – Meydanı. In this route the aim was to “see” the layers of the city “with and without”. We experienced the differences in the level of the abstractions of our sketches during the “Fast Sketch” game, as each of us has a different way and eye to see the “disguised landscapes”.
Route 2. Seğmenler Parkı | Tunalı Hilmi Caddesi | Kennedy Caddesi | Bulvar | Kızılay
On the second day, the “scape” involved both the living and non-living nature and the movement of the body itself in open spaces. In this route, starting from the non-moving scape, green and its lines, the movement of the streets and human bodies in different axes are documented via sketching. Not only the relationships of the scales but also the relationship of the body, movement and sketching is emphasized.
Route 3. Opera Binası | Placelessness |CerModern
On the third route and the third day, the scape was the object, viewer and the vision itself, we attempted to sketch the architectural objects of any scale. Our route started from the Opera Building, and we experienced the placelessness of the pedestrian during the walk to the CerModern. While we were sketching the spaces of CerModern Museum, we also tried to perceive and represent the experience of an ongoing exhibition which was the retrospective of Bedri Rahmi and which was a good example of the plurality and depth of representation and sketching.
Our Feet | Workshop on Movement
The workshop was a post-experience of our previous bodily existences in the city space. Our feet and thoughts were merged in order to make a collage of our walk, our tiredness, our excitement and overall experience. We represented our experimental maps inside the borders of our feet as physical “marks” that we left in each space of the city routes.
Our Hands | Exhibition
The exhibition was created as a post-experience too, but an experience of our visual memory and (photo)graphic perception. In MD 1927 (Architects Association 1972), both of the horizontal and vertical surfaces are used in order to overlap the idea of seeing in each angle, each surface within its relations and surroundings. So, the visual notes of three different routes created three dimensional representational spaces, similar to the way how they were created, perceived or remembered. We experienced the surfaces of our experience and of the space of exhibition with our hands and create another experience bodily, juxtaposing the experiences of walking and representing.
Our Mind | Conclusion
At the end of the workshop, as urban walkers and sketchers, we understood that sketching is based on “experience” excluding the terms of “good” and “bad” sketch, each individual has different lines, colors, abstraction levels, experiences to represent and document. In a way, the sketchbook becomes a personal “collection”. We experienced the spaces of the city through not only seeing, but also contemplating with both an individual body and a collective one. The presence/absence of the body in the city and its ability/disability to move through the urban spaces diversified the collective experience and documented lines of the experiences.
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