Taksim square

Taksim is a great urban void in search of a form. This void has the sheer size, the multiplicity and the perfect location to be a „place for everything and everyone”, yet in its current form it somehow dissolves into the functional systems and spaces of urbanization. On Taksim everything happens and could happen performed by possibly everyone – the gigantic multitude of Istanbul – but it struggles to become a clearly defined, legible place. The problem of Taksim is not really that of organisation or accesibility, but rather the problem of interface, the relationship between the void and the built matter of the city, the problem of the difficult whole of figure and ground, the problem of limits and frames, of scale and legibility.

Our proposal aims to define a posibble process of transforming the spaces of this multifaceted void into generous, legible places, and to offer a set of architectural forms and structures as the tools of this transformation. Instead of the hopeless and superficial project of imposing some kind of pre processed „identity” onto Taksim square and Gezi Park, our modest aim is to accentuate the already existing potentials, to clarify and slightly modify the realtionships between the constituent parts (squares, promenades, parks, mounds, slopes, monuments, infrastructures) of the void, and to give a more „readable” defintion to these elements. Our method is less about an authorial „design” of a new, ideal Taksim, than about the selection of a wide.

Media:

https://futurearchitectureplatform.org/projects/1732cb21-519b-4a25-8d59-5874fcff9d94/