(1/3) IT’S A MESS: a prise of contingency

Life and Death

Walking through the old neighbourhoods of Istanbul it is easily recognizable how the city is made by the coexistence of traces left by various people and several slices of time. Some corners seem to belong to the domain of chaos where everything is left to grow like a climbing plant. This is extremely and oddly charming to the eyes of a young architect who grew up with the myth of the order, cleanliness and purity. Here there is disorder, dirt, mess, dare I say ‘life’. Most of our cities are made by layers of different epochs, memories and stories, and the geometric order and chaos lie down together in urban structures. Design and other self-organising processes merge in the creation of the architectural space that is a continuous process of construction and destruction, adaptation and change of ownership. The accumulation of all these processes causes a spatial complexity that rarely corresponds to a conscious design planning but rather it acts as a storage of these free mutations and transformations: in this way, to our senses, architecture begins to be chaotic.

On the other hand, contemporary architectural language tends to be more and more homogeneous all over the world, due to the fact that cultural and economic conditions push towards an architecture that is increasingly part of global trends. These interventions often attack and corrode the old urban fabric and the local components disappear, or survive after being transformed. This is after all the evolution: the strongest survive after a process of natural selection. In fact walking through the new neighbourhoods of Istanbul, that are rapidly changing, you realize how that beauty of chaos gives way to a strange technological order, cold and characterless. The order of the new infrastructure, the denial of historical layers and the irresponsible gentrification correspond to several conscious design planning that rarely communicate with each other. Despite the old seems to occupy a contemporary place in the meeting point between past and future, the new seems the ‘petrification of a cultural moment’ that has no future. This is destabilizing, there’s a sort of mess, dare I say ‘death’. (Second part: http://wp.me/p93R0R-1u )

Germen M., Muta-morphosis, 2011. Avaible on: http://muratgermen.com/artworks/mutamorphosis/#image-11