Datça Summer Workshop 2025 was a two-week design-build program that provided the village square of Hızırşah, on the Datça Peninsula, with a new shaded wooden infrastructure for play, gathering, and everyday rural life. Building on the 2024 research on vernacular “çardak” structures, the workshop combined a first week of theoretical studies with a second week of construction to reinterpret this almost-forgotten, lightweight agricultural typology for contemporary use.
From research to design-build
Conceived as “Lightweight Structures in Vernacular Agroscapes II,” the 2025 edition extended an ongoing exploration of Mediterranean rural landscapes, local forms of production, and their associated architectures. During the first week at Istanbul Bilgi University’s Santral Campus, students revisited the 2024 study of the çardak through readings, drawings, and lectures, and complemented it with new oral accounts gathered from villagers that helped reconstruct the structure’s spatial, functional, and tectonic qualities.
In the historic landscapes of Datça, the çardak was a lightweight, reversible, demountable and temporary wooden structure, built directly in the fields as a vernacular form of seasonal dwelling. It multiplied uses within a compact footprint—at once shelter, workplace, and storage—and operated as an intermediate space between the open field and domestic life, offering shade, protection and a precise, minimal way of inhabiting the landscape. These “design lessons” framed the approach for 2025: an architecture that is low-tech yet carefully tectonic, adaptable, and generous to its users.
A new wooden structure for Hızırşah
The second week took place in Hızırşah Village, an agriculture-based settlement where the schoolyard functions as the village square and the main stage for daily activities, gatherings, and weddings. With the support of Datça Municipality, which provided the site, and Asmaz Ahşap Karkas Yapılar, which supplied the timber, the team prefabricated and assembled a 22 m² wooden structure that adds a new open-air room at the edge of the square.
Organized around a long built-in table, stepped platforms, and a sequence of shaded thresholds, the structure acts as grandstand, classroom, playground, and shared living room for the village. Its repetitive timber frame, reed panels, and agricultural fabric shades echo the lightweight, reversible and demountable character of the historic çardak, while remaining fully open to future adaptations and informal uses.
Education, collaboration and future life
Bringing together students and recent graduates from Istanbul Bilgi University, Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University, and İzmir Ekonomi University, in collaboration with Wentworth Institute of Technology, the workshop offered intensive hands-on experience in designing and building with wood. Led by Istanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Architecture (Burcu Kütükçüoğlu and Elif Kendir Beraha) and developed with Erazo Pugliese and Erginoglu & Çalışlar Architects, the project used the çardak as both reference and lens: a way to think about how small, temporary, vernacular-like interventions can give back a versatile, appropriable public space to the local community.
Throughout the construction, villagers—especially children—engaged with the emerging structure, turning the site into a place of exchange, observation, and play even before completion. As in the design lessons drawn from the çardak, the true measure of the 2025 intervention will be how Hızırşah’s inhabitants continue to inhabit, transform, and narrate this new shaded commons over seasons to come.
