Architecture as Measure
John Hill
8. April 2020
Spread from Architecture as Measure by Neyran Turan, Actar Publishers, 2020 (All photos by John Hill/World-Architects)
If not for the coronavirus, Neyran Turan's Architecture as Measure would be opening next month in the Turkish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. For those who don't want to wait until (fingers crossed) August, we take a look inside Turan's newly released book of the same name.
Architecture as Measure asks, "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?"
Further, "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 a serious book, aiming to ignite the architectural imagination around large-scale environmental crises. But it's also visually appealing, with projects, installations, renderings, and exhibitions within renderings that entice through form, color, lighting, and texture. A few spreads from the book are below.
The Museum of Lost Volumes looks ahead to the "Zero-carbon Hedonistic Era," in which the earth is sustainable but all of the rare earth minerals needed for solar panels, wind turbines, electric car batteries, and the like were depleted.
The Museum of Lost Volumes would be made up of rooms with giant voids symbolizing the minerals extracted by humanity in its efforts at sustainability.
The Strait project was installed at the SALT gallery in Istanbul in 2015. The walls, echoing the meandering course of the Bosphorus Strait, look like fabric in photos ...
... But in fact the walls of Strait were made from crown molding profiles commonly used in interiors in Istanbul and other parts of the world.
The Strait installation was complemented by a short film in the form of an architectural narrative: Oilella, the largest oil tanker in the world, gets stuck in the Bosphorus Strait in 2025.
New Cadavre Exquis is a project from 2017 that took digital readymades (ducts, hinges, geometric forms, pipes, etc.) and reassembled them into building designs.
Middle Earth – Dioramas for the Planet imagines a museum for a post-natural state, as part of a future in which the climate has changed. The Plastic Pacific Hall diorama portrays plastic trash piled into shapes.
Inspired by the camouflaging of rooftops of large buildings in World War II, Flatbed Junk, also pictured at top, imagines massive buildings — on the scale of Tesla's Gigafactory — where the view from a satellite extends to the interiors: "a love-hate story between the plan and the roof."
Instead of using highly polished renderings just to imagine speculative assemblies, Our Junk, Their Ruin is a video that depicts the dis-assembly of a virtual diorama, a scattering of objects and illustrations that reflects the real junk in our real environments.
Architecture as Measure
Neyran Turan
Partner at NEMESTUDIO
15.9 x 23.5cm
300 Pages
Paperback
ISBN 9781948765299
Actar Publishers
Purchase this book