Architecture as Measure – Ölçü Olarak Mimarlık

17. Venedik Mimarlık Bienali Türkiye Pavyonu’nda bu sene yer alacak projenin küratörlüğünü üstlenen Neyran Turan’ın "Architecture as Measure" isimli kitabı yayımlandı.

İklim değişikliği çevresinde oluşan mevcut politik krizin ışığında mimarlık, çevrecilik ve teknolojik determinizmin ötesinde farklı diyaloglara olanak tanıyacak alternatif bir çevre düşüncesi için ne katkıda bulunabilir? 

Neyran Turan, Türkiye Pavyonu’nda sergileyeceği projenin çıkış noktasını oluşturan kitabında bu soruyu, iklim değişikliğini yenilenmiş bir mimari çevresel hayal gücü gerektiren kültürel ve politik fikir olarak konumlandırarak ele alıyor. Ön yazı bölümünün yanında dokuz ayrı başlıktan oluşan kitapta Neyran Turan’ın metinleri, NEMESTUDIO’nun projelerinden örnekler ile destekleniyor. Her bir başlık ve proje, iklim değişikliğinin getirdiği çeşitli problemleri mimari açıdan ele alıyor.

Graham Foundation desteğiyle yayımlanan Architecture as Measure’ın basım ve dağıtımını Actar Publishers, grafik tasarımını ise Studiolin üstlendi.

Kitabın tanıtım metninden:

In light of the current political crisis around climate change, what can architecture possibly contribute towards a new planetary imaginary of our contemporary environment beyond environmentalism and technological determinism? Instead of conceptualizing the idea of the environment as purely natural and in need of protection, as solely a problem that needs to be managed, or merely as the Earth, which limits the scope with a scalar bias, can we speculate on architecture as a measure both to assess and to act upon the world? Architecture as Measure is an elaboration on this question, and on the disciplinary and cultural potentials of such a provocation. It positions climate change as a cultural and political idea that requires a renewed architectural environmental imagination.

The book takes on this task by presenting a set of unconventional collisions between architecture and climate change, which all extrapolate broader concerns of the city, environment, and geography through the lens of specific architectural questions such as form, representation and materiality. In that way, the book is an invitation to boost architecture’s planetary effect by collapsing the centers and the peripheries of the discipline, by colliding its very outside with its very core interior. In addition to the introductory essay, the book consists of nine separate chapters, each of which contains an essay by Neyran Turan and is coupled by a project by her architectural practice NEMESTUDIO. Each essay, and thus the associated project in each chapter, positions certain problems brought by climate change, such as resource extraction, materiality, long time span, representation, geology, and waste etc. in architectural terms. Inherent in the premise of the book is the proposition of a new conception of architecture’s engagement with the wider world through a specific focus on architecture’s capacity to boost its planetary effect from within.