Month: February 2017
Murat Germen’s Speech for UMÖB
Hi, everyone!
I was mentioned about an organization which is called UMÖB before (https://hazalgurgoze.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/umob-16bucuk/) In that post, I am planning to talk about one of the events in UMÖB.
Murat Germen gave a speech for the participants of UMÖB at last days. Before I broach about the content of the speech, I want to share the Murat Germen’s biography which is published on the official website of Murat Germen.
“Murat Germen is an artist using photography as an expression/research tool. Born 1965, he currently lives/works in Istanbul and London. Has a MArch degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he went as a Fulbright scholar and received AIA Henry Adams Gold Medal for academic excellence. Works as a professor of art, photography and new media at Sabanci University in Istanbul. Having many papers, photo series published on architecture/photography/art/new media in various publications; he has lectured at tens of conferences internationally.”( http://muratgermen.com/about/ )
As a start for the speech, Murat Germen mentioned about his works such as his visual and writing works and his exhibitions. About it works especially his panoramic photographs, he said that he took them for creating documents for the city but I think he also raises awareness to people the effects of the architecture on the cities because when we look at his panoramic works, we sometimes only see lots of stacks which are created with the structures like buildings. Besides his photography works, his writings which he comments on the problems with the city and causes of the problems are very valuable. He wanted to unmask the cities in his writings, I think. For example, he talked about that the cities promise us the freedom but the cities are the world of the middlemen and those deprive the freedom of the citizens.
Generally, the speech is about today’s architecture of Turkey. For instance, he criticized the increasing number of the skyscrapers in Turkey. In connection with the comment of Murat Germen, I want to put my thoughts in writing.
As everyone knows, the skyscrapers are tall buildings so they set a vertical relation with the cities that pose problems in the interaction among the people comparing with the buildings which have dominancy on the horizontal axis. Because of that, the places where people socialize are decreasing and the interaction between the citizens are getting poor so the doubts between the people are raising. For that reason, even we do not notice, we limit ourselves.
With the repetition of the same form of that kind of structures, the cities lose their architectural identity. In the past, there were unique forms of the buildings in each region which are created in accordance with their climatic conditions and geographical features of them. However, now, because of the typological qualities of the skyscrapers and the tendency of building those kinds of structure in Turkey, we started to see the same things in everywhere.
Besides the skyscraper issues, Murat Germen mentioned about the wrong architectural interventions in Turkey. Briefly, that subject was analyzed by talking about building unnecessary structures in irrelevant places and the effects of that situation.
There were more than these and as a freshman, I can say that it helped me to be informed of the issues and verify my thoughts.
I hope you can benefit from that post 🙂
UMÖB 16buçuk
Hi there!
I want to mention about a meeting which the 35th of it is arranged in Ankara, Turkey nowadays. The students in Turkey call it UMÖB which means “National Architecture Students Meeting”. The meeting, that is organized by some architecture students, provides some opportunities for all architecture students to visit different cities and analyze the architectural features of the cities. Also, the participants of the meeting obtain some chances to attend events which serve the opportunity of talking about architecture and doing some architectural activities. I had a chance to take place in the organization team. The Organization step was really hard but nowadays I enjoy it
In next posts, I am planning to talk about the contents of some events in UMÖB.
(the image is designed by me)
Today’s Illustration
Bernard Tschumi characterization with watercolor for the VOID magazine.
Hazal Gurgoze 