The Little Raven of Ilya designed for Slant Open International Landscape Design Competition 2013, “Evoking Memories”. Shortlisted and exhibited on http://www.slant.eu/index.html
Project Description
The Little Raven of Ilya
Team:
Esen Gökçe Özdamar (architect) ,
Supervisor: Gökçen Firdevs Yücel Caymaz (landscape architect)
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The Little Raven of Ilya
Traces
of a culture of tolerance and multiculturalism in urban space
Sustaining
memories of a neighbourhood with nature
This is the story of a
naturally formed public farm being used about 700 years, along the coastline of
Bosphorus, Kuzguncuk in Istanbul. The project area is a small neighbourhood,
where traditional practice and social tie of the community are strong with a
great emphasis on neighborliness dynamics. The neighbourhood of Kuzguncuk acts
as a meeting place of many religions and ethnic groups for the last 200 years.
The place has been a milestone in the evolution of the content of public meaning
change.
For every Istanbul
resident, neighbourhood farms like Kuzguncuk, hold a certain memory regarding childhood
experiences: of being together with family, friends and relatives, spending
time in the street playing in the garden, eating and stealing fruit; a sense of
community and neighborliness, or a workplace district for communities;
craftsmen, petty dealers, artists, architects, designers, film makers and backpackers
and visitors.
Located
in and surrounded by a 17-decare green area, Kuzguncuk has a vegetable garden,
named as Ilya’s garden where the whole community meets. It has been preserved
with topographical location means : remaining as a village between Fethipaşa Grove
and Nakkaşbaba Cemetery within an intellectual and exceptionally tolerant
structure.
Kuzguncuk
can be accepted as the only village left within the Bosporus coastline, protecting
itself from urban problems such as dense housing, continuous and rapid traffic
of transformation, “gentrification” that has been going on for a while under
the euphemism of urban renewal, “dislocation”, and “value enhancement” (1). The
name of the district is from the word Kozinitsa, but the current name can be
translated as the “little raven”. The existing garden was owned by a Greek
family for generations and Ilya was its owner and gardener. “The gardener who
owned it worked the garden until his death, and was buried in the Greek
cemetery that adjoins the garden. At this point his share in the property was
not passed to his descendant but became terty of the state” (2). Another
estimation is that the name has been derived from Kuzgun, who used to live here
in fifteenth century. Kuzguncuk was once home to many of the Jews who settled
in the Ottoman Empire. Armenians began moving into the area in the eighteenth
century. There was also a large Greek community, evident from the original
Greek name and neighborhood was home to Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and Turks, as
evidenced by the synagogues, churches, and mosques that were all built” (3).
This
place has become a globally known. In recent years, starting some 20 years ago,
there are frequent protests held under the threat of corporate gentrification. “By
2001, the property had an ambiguous status and lay untended for years while it
was rented on a decade-long lease”. However, Ilya’s garden has become a symbol
of memory and resistance. For the neighbourhood association, the garden is a
symbol place for urban growth threat and
government threat which is seen as a corruption in Istanbul (2). Ilya’s garden
is a place for consideration of Istanbul’s cosmopolitan and multicultural past,
a traditional neighborhood with strong social ties and a history of peaceful
coexistence.
The Design
Nature
is a place of healing and revealing of existence, and Ilya’s garden is no
exception. This is a place where one becomes alive through all senses: touching,
hearing, seeing, smelling and taste in the dense nature within the limits of an
existing urban space. The existing garden of 5200 m2 is naturally surrounded by
Lonicera spp. (honeysuckle), Quince, Tilia
spp. (Linden) and Cercis ciliquastrum (Judas trees), Populus spp. (Poplar) and
Ficus carica (Commong fig) on three sides and old wooden traditional Turkish
houses on the southern side. Therefore, in order to reveal and sustain this piece
of natural organized garden which evokes the memory of a mix of culture and
manipulate our senses of nature as a crosscutting border between man made
environment and nature itself, Ilya’s Little Raven as a show garden depicts the
thresholds of as a smooth transformation and uniqueness in our very urbanized
world.
The
proposal depends on a basic feeling: the garden is both a bounding for individuals
and the community with the nature beyond anything. In order to sustain this, the garden is not
designed as a separate space, but as a part of the entity of the nature. The
proposed garden is located in the continuous part of biodiversity; it is rather
a place at the beginning which exists not only to be viewed or spent time
around, but to gather together and react upon the loosening values of nature
between man in a neighbourhood. Therefore, the new design aims to create transient
plays, traces and structures that create a kind of protest and communal life
like a rebellious raven awaiting for the future of the garden.
The
show garden, approximately 576 m2, is
located in the southeastern side of the existing garden, with one the eastern
side bordered by fruit trees and the other sides bordered by fields of warm-season
crops such as Lycopersicon esculentum (Tomato), Solanum melongena (Eggplant),
Cucurbita pepo (Pumpkin), Zea mays (Maize), Cucurbita maxima (Squash) and
cool-season crops such as lettuce (Petroselinum crispum), Brassica oleracea
(Cabbage), Spinacia oleracea (Spinach ), Capsicum (Chilli pepper), Petroselinum
crispum (Parsley). The rest of the garden is
left for the field and vegetable garden, as a cultivation and meeting point to
improve the identity of social gatherings.
The space of show garden is transitional due to its
cyclic relation with the environment and endemic species in the area. The show
garden is enclosed by hinged walls, referring to an abstraction of a wild raven
that has landed on land. It arouses
interest and signs the borders between man made environment and the memory of
the first historical space as a healing space, where one is fed.
The
proposed design suggests a sublime perception where dwellers and visitors of
the neighbourhood could think about the borders between inside/outside. Cor-ten
steel pavilion of 2 meters height and wooden canopy in the entrance, relate to
the works of the artists and craftsmen living in the district. Traces depict a
border between the meaning of agriculture and horticulture in the city,
displaying the difference between which is not need to be so defined in the Kuzguncuk
neighbourhood.
The
design aims to sustain the activist spirit and the role in collective consciousness
and cultural heritage, considering the idyllic diversity of the community and
withstanding recent transformations of Istanbul's cultural landscapes. Ilya’s
Little Raven is one of the rare conditions in our globalized world with a disappearing
spirit of collective.
References:
1. Dündaralp, Boğaçhan,
“Orchard the Brave Versus Transforming Istanbul / New
City Reader”, December, 2012, Available at: http://bogachandundaralp.wordpress.com/?s=bostan
(accessed May 13, 2013).
2. Mills, Amy, 2006. ‘Boundaries of the nation in
the space of the urban: landscape and social memory in Istanbul’, Cultural geographies, 13: 367-394. Available
at:
http://ganymedes.lib.unideb.hu:8080/udpeer/bitstream/2437.2/12048/1/PEER_stage2_10.1191%252F1474474006eu364oa.pdf
(accessed April 15, 2013).
3. Yemni, Yeşim, “History of
Kuzguncuk”, October 12, 2012, Available at: http://www.theguideistanbul.com/news/detail/815/History-of-Kuzguncuk
(accessed April 10, 2013).
Read More: History of
Kuzguncuk from The Guide Istanbul http://www.theguideistanbul.com/news/detail/815#ixzz2T10
References in presentation boards:
1. Mills, Amy, 2006. ‘Boundaries of the nation in
the space of the urban: landscape and social memory in Istanbul’, Cultural geographies, 13: 367-394.
Available at:
http://ganymedes.lib.unideb.hu:8080/udpeer/bitstream/2437.2/12048/1/PEER_stage2_10.1191%252F1474474006eu364oa.pdf
(accessed April 15, 2013).
2. Map, available at http://www.google.com/earth/index.html
(accessed April 5, 2013).
3. Maps available at:
http://sehirrehberi.ibb.gov.tr/map.aspx (accessed
April 5, 2013).
4. Cor-ten steel texture available at: http://archisad.livejournal.com/9883.html?thread=118427
(accessed April 5, 2013).
5. Wood log texture available at: http://www.digetexhome.com/log-cabin-wallpaper-mural.html
(accessed April 5, 2013).
6. Wood chip texture available at: http://www.picture-newsletter.com/index.htm
(accessed April 5, 2013).
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