??Artificial ecologies: Concert beach on steppe lands of Ankara

“Studio Capital Region focuses on the challenges in the urban nodes of global networks, which could be part of centralized, decentralized or distributed structures. Despite its immediate association to governmental/administrative cities, Capital Region is a framework to undertake a comprehensive research into the spatial issues in the leading, transforming and/or emergent urban centres with their hinterland in the globalized networks of growth, sprawl, accumulation and even counter-urbanization. Within this framework, the city is considered to be a fundamental object of architecture. Hence, architectural production is considered to be a projection to the “project of the city” at large. The studio aims at investigating the latencies of architectural strategies by focusing on the site-specific situations conditioned by the mentioned complexity of capital regions.” Within this framework of the design studio, the case of State Farm founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1925 portrays an actual urban potential that currently lies in the very centre of capital city of Turkey, Ankara. The State Farm was meant to portray the ambitions of modernization project of the country by creating an epitome of scientific agricultural production, industry and leisure annexed to the newly founded capital city’s urban desires. However, the idealism of nature as a complimentary binary to the urban order of the city was shattered by the pressure of rapid growth of the city starting from 1950’s. Because of the migration of masses of labour to the city after 1950’s and especially 1980’s, the city that was planned for 600.000 inhabitants has reached the population of 4,5 million in a couple of decades. Consequently, the State Farm Land also lost its role by becoming literally surrounded by urban settlements and being fragmented by land speculations. However, with the critical framework reflecting on the utopian basis of the project of modernity, I see the actual condition of the State Farm as a temporal projection on its initial ambitions, as it needs to be realigned with the changing demands of the society and the conditions of urban growth. Yet, it’s also fact that the city of Ankara also needs a review of those initial desires of urban speculation and growth to be brought in harmony with the urgency of re-establishing an urban ecology, which is also jeopardized by the degeneration of the public space due to the dominance of the transportation system by heavy prominence of private cars in the traffic. In Ankara, the changes in the economical and political patterns have resulted in an extremely fast growth of the population, which has manifested itself in a monotone urban sprawl, lacking diverse public program. The traditional idea of the city with its dense public centre with dwelling around is not valid anymore. The city needs accessible, low threshold public spaces and programs, as a line through the city. The state farm was the first example of transformation of agriculture by using scientific methods and modern technology. But today this area does not fulfil its purpose anymore, and has lost its meaning. Its purpose was to create a new society by bringing together, modern agricultural and industrial production techniques, combining them with leisure activities and developing an urban farm. This idea didn’t last very long, because of the changing society, behaviours and economy. The temporality of this vision is obvious when we look at the current state of the city. It has lost the quality of living in harmony with nature and also the idea of conquering nature and making it part of daily life. The city, which was meant to be a garden city, finally became a car city. This is why it’s meaningful to focus on the natural artefacts and re-qualify these. The main theme of the project is Utopia as a temporal projection. In my opinion it’s only valid for a certain period of time because of the changing society and the changing needs. It’s an illusion to think that a utopian projection lasts forever; therefore, I propose a model for temporal desires. The theme of temporality is translated into a spine of urban ecology that can facilitate many public and infrastructural programs in combination. One of the strategies applied to provide low threshold public spaces and improve the life quality in Ankara was to utilize the Ankara River as the armature or the spine of my proposal to enhance the public life on the green grounds of State Farm in the middle of the Anatolian steppe land. The unfolding of public programs on this spine will provide the city with an integral backbone of leisure zone stretched out along the east-west core of the city. Ankara River is a small river that runs through the city. Because of long time exposure to sewage and industrial pollutants, it is no longer viable as a water source for irrigation. The river splits Ankara almost in half and crosses through many neighbourhoods and the city’s lowlands. There are many bridges built over it throughout the city and in some instances it is completely covered and encased in a tunnel. The proposed plan is to re-qualify the riverbed of Ankara and adopt it as a backbone of diverse public programs to utilize it both as a social and ecological infrastructure for the city. Therefore, the scarce resource of water is used as the main organizing element for providing diverse programming to the city. This is done by widening the river for more infiltration and by installing a geo-membrane on the riverbed so the water doesn’t sink into the ground and stops the flow. Along the river, constructed wetlands need to be created to clean the water of the river, and the storm water. The constructed wetlands function as decentralized water treatment plants which constantly clean the water of the river and decrease substantially the pollution by the city. The clean water will then be used to create lakes. The lakes are combined with different public programs. For example the first lake, which is closest to the city centre is combined with a beach as the main program. Like the river, the beach has been approached as a spine with different programs connected to it. This ecology functions as a concert beach, with a rock centre as the main program; because of the many emerging rock bands and the lack of a suitable place where they can perform. Similar to the urban proposal and the beach, the design of the rock centre is conceived as a compact and functional armature, which allows for diverse spatial quality of the design. This building works as the proof of concept of architecture as the generator of social events and also exhibits the pursuit to create architectural singularities within the urban program. The goal of this way of dealing with the project of the city is to create a master plan for improving the quality of the public life as well as the water quality and ecological diversity of the city. Mahyar NikkhoyPublic Realm : Ankara StudioPublic buildingsArchitectur