Master’s student Antonio Boeri’s dissertation ‘City in/for Transition’ has been awarded 2nd place in the Architectural Thesis Award 2017 in the Archistart competition ATA 2017.
Last year the project had already received the Dean’s choice award by Dag Boutsen, Dean of the faculty.
The research implemented in the Sali Pazari area in Istanbul, Turkey have focused on specific ‘time sections’ which are considered to be relevant not only to the understanding of the actual urban configuration but also regarding the social organization of the district. ‘Temporality’ has been here used as a research filter to investigate the complex and diverse forces that have shaped the urban fabric of Kadikoy in the past. The main aim was understanding how the social fabric have reacted to these shifts and which kind of social target could be integrated into a requalification strategy to preserve the strong sense of identity that the district is gradually losing.
The research-to-design approach developed proposed a “master process” which incorporates -in its own functioning- the tools to deal with complexity, conflicts and changes, and that will be supported by the diagnosis, plans, and projects already realized in the city during the last decades. This particular method is an attempt to make a novel link between space and time, which aims to overcome the past conception of programmatic statis, by starting looking at the urban-architectural project as a ‘process of change’: a) understanding space and everyday activities through time and b) creating space-time scenarios for an urban project.