Neyran Turan is a partner at NEMESTUDIO together with Mete Sonmez. She is architect, professor and editor in chief of the first numbers of New Geographies. Also, she wrote various articles, some of which were recently published on ARPA Journal, SAN ROCCO and Scenario Journal. Inspired by the unconventional approach of the office, Artwort had a talk with NEMESTUDIO.
Your work sways between abstraction and material and your office deals with both in research, design and critique. As printed writings become tangible, architectural projects remain conceptual. How do you combine ideas and practice? How material or immaterial is architecture for you?
Neyran Turan (NT): Architecture is a discipline that requires productive contestations between different modalities and formats in order to remain relevant: between the abstract and the real or between theory and practice. For us, it is almost impossible to conceive architecture without the interactions of those kinds of dualities. In our work, we are interested in colliding the banal and the spectacular against one another to interchange and problematize the assumptions that come with those terms. By an interest in the banal and the spectacular, I mean revisiting a familiar aspect in architectural terms and bringing an unfamiliar interpretation regarding that question. For us, the banal or the familiar could be a question about a certain construction technique (e.g. the glass structural column in our Porcupine Pavilion project), an architectural typology (e.g. the shotgun house type in our LV House project) or the geographic imagination of a resource landscape (e.g. our Museum of Lost Volumes project or recent Strait installation). In all of these projects, to maintain a specific relationship between the abstract and real has been important for us. In order for us to be able to focus and speculate on these kinds of collisions, one automatically has to let go of rigidities and biases in relation to possible modes of practicing architecture. We produce both speculative projects and client driven/commissioned projects and are involved in teaching and research, and all of these different practices play important roles for our work.
Geography is one of your most debated themes, you based several publications on this very topic and even promoted a journal about it. Which role does geography play in your work? If it is not a mere objective tool to cut out data from space can it be a way to create space?
NT: Yes, geography is an important topic in our work. In my research and teaching, I am interested in the relationship between geography and design and opening up new aesthetic and political trajectories within architecture and urbanism. Rather than seeing geography’s potential merely as an analytical tool of description or an expansion of scale, NEMESTUDIO’s interest in geography relates to our broader ambition to contruct renewed dialogues between aesthetics and engagement for architecture—dialogues that are committed to the specificity of architecture as a discipline yet are equally rigorous to engage with the city and the environment. Our engagements with geography started with my research projects on the topic as well as my involvement in the founding of the New Geographies journal. After that, other research and speculative projects played an important role for specifying our actual focus in the office.
In our recent Strait installation, for instance, geographic scale is positioned architecturally through the scale of an installation object. The installation manifests the constrained and narrow oil-transit passage of the Bosphorus Strait as a geographic object, a human-scaled passageway achieved by the extrusion of the Strait shorelines without articulating its actual topography. Situating itself in between a colossal architectural model and an out-of-scale monolith, the installation aims to open up a range of aesthetic and political concerns for architectural imagination and the broader public. In this project, it was important for us to speculate on the very interplay between architectural and geographic scales. This interplay is amplified via two specific aspects of the installation, both of which push the limits of architectural representation with a particular geographic imagination.
First is the very detailing of the installation object itself by the abstraction and re-construction of the crenelated shorelines of the Bosphorus through local crown moulding profiles, an ornamentation technique typically applied to the corners of interior ceilings. By collapsing the vertical extrusion of geographic information (shorelines) with the horizontal extrusion of a ceiling ornamental profile, the shorelines become both more tangible and more abstracted at an architectural scale. While utilizing the elemental technique of geometric extrusion by way of juxtaposing a plan condition (shorelines) with a section profile (crown moulding), the project sets out a new dialog, as though Superstudio’s horizontal extrusion New York profile from the Continuous Monument project (1969) suddenly started speaking with Mies van der Rohe’s vertical charcoal extrusion of the plan at his Glass Skyscraper project (1922).
Second, the installation is rooted in a geographic fiction, which is illustrated through a series of speculative architectural drawings and presented in the form of a silent film. While this geographic fiction tells the story of a colossal oil tanker becoming stuck in the Bosphorus Strait, the installation object itself is presented as one of the leading characters in the fiction.
Scale affects the shape of architecture: since we live in a thin layer of atmosphere, horizontality prevails on volumes if we talk about large scale design. Various architects in the past decades approached large scale design as a matter of surface. On the other hand architecture becomes real in the three dimensional space. How do you relate to scale in your projects?
NT: Much of our recent projects and writings problematize the limited understanding of the horizontal surface in architectural urbanism. For instance, my short essay titled Flat Primitive and our speculative project TYPO both argue for a much expanded politics and aesthetics of territory in architecture. Both the article and the TYPO project call for a particular aesthetic understanding of the horizontal that goes beyond the seamless ground of field conditions where everything is connected to one another via flows and networks. TYPO is a speculative urban project that introduces a new role for architecture at the territorial scale by proposing a new type of spatial organization and a collective institution for the university campuses in Istanbul. For the TYPO project, we were inspired by the abstract and elemental language as well as the nuanced calibration of diversity and unity that existed in the multiple interventions of Mathias Ungers’ Landwehrkanal-Tiergarten project for Berlin and in the territorial cut-outs of Sol LeWitt’s A Square of Chicago without a Circle and Triangle. While iconicity is reduced either to the fantastic Bilbao Effect or to the degrading of the icon altogether these days, the TYPO project asserts that territories can have forms and that they can offer a very different level of legibility, monumentality, and thus iconicity. In the end, the TYPO project can be thought of an experiment on a more nuanced relationship between abstraction and realism at the territorial scale.
Environment is an ambiguous concept, alternatively considered as a source to use or as a vestige to preserve. In both cases it is not considered an object in itself, but related to a purpose. In Museum of Lost Volumes you approach environmental issues in unexpected and slightly paradoxical terms. In relation to this project, what is your position towards environment?
NT: Environment is a contentious term for architecture and related design fields. Usually, it is either conceptualized as purely natural and therefore is looked at as something to preserve or protect or it is presented as purely systemic through discourses of efficiency and looked at as something to manage and maintain. These tendencies are pervasive in architectural practice and academia. In our work, we are interested in speculating on environment not as preservation or management but as an aesthetic and monumental phenomenon and construct new dialogues between the representational and the material.
Museum of Lost Volumes project takes on this theoretical prompt directly. As a geo-architectural fiction and a satire commentary on resource extraction, it provides an alternative focus on the mining of Rare Earth minerals. As a museum built after the depletion of Rare Earth minerals in the world after their abundant use with “green technologies,” it speculates on the preservation of geographic ruins that once belonged to the resource extraction of Rare Earth minerals mining. Since Rare Earth minerals are the backbone substance that is used in clean-energy technologies such as wind-turbines, electric batteries and solar panels, the project questions the idea of resource scarcity in the abundance of green technologies. It imagines a museum of ancient resource extraction ruins for a time when mining is an obsolete practice and treated similarly to an ancient monument or an extinct species to be housed in a museum. While rendering the geographic scale as a tangible entity, it aims to construct an alternative relationship between legibility and abstraction through the limits and potentials of design thinking. The project is comprised of five drawings, which all depict specific aspects of this imaginary museum.
While projecting on an unknown future era, Museum of Lost Volumes is slightly unfamiliar. In an attempt to expand the limits of our disciplinary imaginary, it employs familiar architectural strategies on what is considered to be unfamiliar within a disciplinary setting—in this case mining—and brings it into architectural consciousness. Perhaps in the same manner that Karl Friedrich Schinkel found beauty in the English factories, Walter Gropius in the American grain silos, and Le Corbusier in the ocean liner, it points to the ruthless territorial geometries of mining through architectural imagination. Rather than promoting a project of super realism (think: scenario planning or environmental engineering of data) nor extreme surrealism (think: architectural sci-fi), it aims to unravel the potentials of the unfamiliar precisely at the opposite end of the spectrum through abstraction. While speculating on humans’ relationship to the earth, it situates the idea of the slightly unfamiliar as an alternative positioning between the geographic and the aesthetic.
Finally, is there a hope for creation? Against efficiency and problem-solving used as prevailing tools for design, do you think we can still aim at aesthetic or meaning, or are they too arbitrary?
NT: Arbitrariness or superficiality will always be there as long as a particular aesthetic attention is not strong. On the contrary, a rigorous focus and attention to the political potentials of aesthetics can have unprecedented relevance and power in the world. Beyond problem solving or neo-environmentalist do-goodism and the current preoccupation with complex geometries and sustainability agendas, we are interested in radical anomalies that do not shy away from wrestling with questions of aesthetics, form and language while still being extremely rigorous about interdisciplinary engagement.
Architecture is both a framing and a measure against which the world might be read. In our work, we constantly find ourselves revisiting archetypical or sometimes even archaic elements of architecture such as grids, rooms, perimeter walls, pitched roofs, domes etc. and dealing with questions of representation since we strongly believe in the importance of taking these disciplinary questions seriously and their relevance for what we do as architects. Rather than a focus on a project of passive diplomacy between aesthetics and interdiciplinary engagement, we believe that alternative worlds are hidden in the nuances and the contradictions established in the radical and unexpected collisions between these dualities.