When asked to design a 120,000m² housing project on a site of 60,000m² for a developer based in Istanbul, Bjarke Ingels Group decided to invite Superpool to think together.
Looking at the city behind the picturesque hills of the Bosphorus, repeated mistakes are visible; developers’ desires for efficiency seem to have handcuffed the Turkish housing typology into blocks with, typically, four units around a central core. The consistent result is that up to a third of these units are compromised; without views, facing other units. And even though generally the zoning laws allow only 25-50% of a given site to be developed, punctured by these indifferent towers, the left over green space is seldom usable. A thousand isolated towers do not make a city. So, BIG and Superpool’s reactions are almost instant and the same: in the suffocated context of Umraniye, the open space of the site has to be preserved at all costs. After all, architecture is not only about the life within buildings, but outside of them, in between, around and on top of them. In fast growing cities where administrative power is weak in protecting the city’s common good, architects need to envision buildings as urban landscape and shelter not only individuals or families, but also communitie
Credit list
Team:
BIG: Bjarke Ingels, Ole Schrøder, Kai-Uwe Bergmann, Christian Alvarez Gomez, Xu Li, Benjamin Engelhardt, Daniel Sundlin, Brian Yang, Cat Huang, Gaetan Brunet, Alysen Hiller, Stanley Lung
SUPERPOOL: Selva Gürdoğan, Gregers Tang Thomsen, Seda Gecü, Magdalena Gössinger, Marta Marszal, Matthias Poen Grontmij I Carl Bro: Kerem Sadıklar, Maja Asaa, Christoffer Borgwardt-Stampe, Daniel Reinert, Søren Aagaard, Morten Hell, Johnny Lund-Petersen, Thanh Quoc Nguyen, Merete Madsen
Type: Competition Size: 120.000 m2 Client: Sur Yapi Location: Istanbul, Turkey Status: Completed
Collaborators: BIG, Grontmij | Carl Bro