LEE- Mimari Tasarım Lisansüstü Programı

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http://hdl.handle.net/11527/19391

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  • Öge
    A twofold act of locating from a critical distance: A revisit to Constant's New Babylon
    (Graduate School, 2023-11-01) Dur, Ali ; Erdem, Arzu ; 502122001 ; Architectural Design
    This work revisits and tries to recuperate a particular project, holding a significant place in recent architectural history and our imaginary repositories, New Babylon of Constant, completed between the years of 1958 and 1974. Besides other particularities vested in its making and reception, that significance can be traced in the unconventionally-long lifespan of the project, taking many forms and guises throughout its nearly two-decade long journey. While being eager to know the reasons behind its rather extensive lifetime, the thesis finds the grounds for its significance in its often-claimed timelessness and possible afterlives; that it could still be a relevant and valid entity of reference – not only for the current architectural discourse but the world at large in this present timespan. Besides these claims and prospects, often asserted by its maker, the reasons for choosing this work in the scope a fairly-large academic endeavor were to be found in an earlier engagement with project, which involves the author and his first ever critical sights of Constant's work in line with these prospects. This separate study, nearly a year prior to the thesis' official commencement, attempts to revisit New Babylon's remains and particular spaces, which is often seen as a planet-sized planning scheme filled with mysterious interiors. Venturing for a digital remake in a timespan and medium foreign to its provenances, this endeavor later revealed to be more than a simple remake of certain architectures – as much as the original project entailed much more, and, at times, seemingly lesser than a planning proposal or some eccentric physicalities. As mostly seen in its rather worded remains and in the firsthand enactments of its makers, what this attempt essentially entailed was a remake of certain mentality and practice, as much as unearthing and performing them in person – a hidden set of traits, lacking any physical form whatsoever by nature, which later revealed to be the most central crux of Constant's legacy. Seemingly, such mentality was also responsible for those architectures and their ever-changing appearances in a fairly-long period; and grounded New Babylon's timeless pretenses that could make it relevant and instrumental as a referential locale to revisit and rediscover today. Upon these findings and critical sights acquired, courtesy of a digital remake project and the accompanying research; the author inclines to look at these peculiarities deeper and in a larger scope – forming a thesis study, along with a central hypothesis, based on these claims and partially-illustrated potentials. So, the first objective of this study reveals as to unravel these facets of the project and to examine such open-ended, nomadic and so-called instrumental premises on an expanded field – by looking at several sources and entanglements recorded in several histories. As with this main agenda, there forms another one linked to another complementary hypothesis – which claims that there might be ways and a provisional set of protocols to utilize these potentials for a critical reading of the present timeline. In all of its parts and at its beginnings, this thesis sets out to find the appropriate methods and vantages to read and recuperate this legacy – where it can be revealed as the open-ended seeing-device as it was supposed to be. For its ends, it seeks out to test these claims, through the agency of its interconnected objectives all centered around New Babylon – where a firsthand utilization of this legacy would at the same time require and then contribute to its extended recuperation at large. Looking for ways and appropriate places to both understand and utilize this project, the thesis chooses a two-phased remembrance as a certain, twofold methodology for its recuperative operations. At the first one, the project is revisited mostly in its own native provinces and accounts in a sort of reversed historiography – cuing from the most recent entanglement that involves the author and first critical sights of New Babylon, then moving back to its official lifetime and further back to its cultural backdrop. It involves a rather outsider and mostly objective reading, where the main purpose is to assemble a theoretical framework around Constant's own craft and its instrumentality. There, while acquiring multiple appropriations and appearances to its part, the project regains its most instrumental and mentality-oriented spirit; becoming an eccentric story without a certain end but one with certain instructions to prolong its lines; mostly resembling its plot in the very ways it was told to its audience. In the second phase, based on this rather voluntary recollection and critical sights of the project, New Babylon is revisited in rather involuntary and fragmented instances, courtesy of Proustian memory – in which it reappears in the author's own space of memory in relation to other theoretical sources, and also to the current present setting. During the former couplings, it is grasped and assessed as a certain kind of theoretical instrument amongst other similar ones that are mainly used for procuring new meanings – based on the concept of seeing existing things in the light of another alternative. Later, also using such rudimentary protocols to enact such instruments, another revisit takes place in the form of a series of timely alignments with Constant's remains – whether to see it might actually help us finding novel sights of what's already existent. Here, our objectives are again twofold; where we both revisit the current world and that of Constant – aligning and moving between interconnected parts – based on the same concept of nearing with seemingly-impossible places and looking at things in a double scheme. In the scope of our intertwined agendas, where we employ New Babylon also as a way to expand it, and vice versa; we simultaneously procure new readings of both New Babylon and the present during this second remembrance – looking at one side from the gloss of the other. Here, some of the key concepts and theoretical models introduced at the beginning of the thesis, such as critical alignments and utopian projections, are further expanded and utilized as a referential framework – both as to understand these imaginary spaces reserved for meaning production, as well as to expand New Babylon's instrumentality upon those lines. In line with the concept of constellations and acquiring new vantages in revisiting a complex legacy as this, the reading positions throughout the thesis are presented as ever-changing and intertwined. That is, in both parts of our remembrance and recuperation, we constantly switch our sources – between the outsider readings and rather personal engagements with the project – based on what reveals in each position. On this course, in a cloud-like structure that is ever-enlarging around Constant's work, we move from one fresh vantage to the next, according to what reveals and is added to the possible meanings of New Babylon – extending our readings on both accounts and in an intertwined scheme. And that's another connotation of a twofold methodology – proposed as a certain way reading and understanding what New Babylon was and further could be. For our conclusions, examining our findings in both parts and collating those seen from both of our positions throughout; we were able prove that New Babylon lived up its timeless, open-ended prospects – offering fresh sights and critical readings in the midst of a far and foreign timespan. In its particular place in utopian projections and their constructive purposes, it availed many alignments, albeit and particularly in fragments – those appearing in relation to one's everyday present.