Arch 202 – Hazal Gurgoze

Hi everyone, after a long break, I turn back with a very beneficial architectural exercise which provides me for practicing how I research and comment about some architectural works or some architects. Briefly, I tried to discover researching in the architectural field.

In that exercises, I had a list of architectural works which includes famous houses designed by known architects and I had two themes that were chosen randomly.

My house list includes;

Walter Gropius, Gropius House /Massachusetts, 1938
Louis Kahn, Esherick House / Pennsylvania,
KazuyoSejima, RyueNishizawa& Associates / SANAA, M House / Japan, 2005
UN Studio / Van Berkel&Bos, Möbius House, Netherlands, 1998
CanÇinici, Microloft II Bulut, İstanbul, 2014
Peter Eisenman, House X 1975
Monolab, Body House / Rotterdam, 2001
Caruso St John, Brick House / London, 2005
SmiljanRadic, Chilean House / Chile, 2006

My themes are “among the giants” and “mutually abandoned” and in accordance with the exercise, with that list and the themes I had to create collages in 2D and 3D.

The first thing that I started was thinking about the themes and finding somehow relation in the list of houses. Since I chose the themes randomly and they seemed to me something which is nonsense, I tried to give them some meanings. For instance, for “among the giants” theme, I gave it the meaning of “among the all significant features of the house” in my mind and for the theme called “mutually abandoned”, I gave it the meaning of “not showing the characters of them while they are coming together”.

I have three 3D collages and two 2D collages which of revisions of each other in order to clarify my ideas in collages. All collages became different after revisions but the ideas behind them were same.

With the themes, I included my collages something coming from the researches about the houses. For “among the giants” theme, I tried to find some important features of the houses which have a relation to each other.

While I was researching about houses the things that caught my attention were the diagram of Mobius House and the use of that diagram while the architects were designing the house. The diagram of the house is formed with a continuous line intersecting at a point like in the form of an infinity symbol so the Mobius house and its diagram underlie my collages.

In searches on the Mobius House, there was a part of like that; “The Mobius band (the diagram of the house) transforms the livings in the house into a walk in the landscape.” After I saw that I thought that the diagram also increases the relation between the outside and inside, in other words, increases the relation between nature and houses. After that, I grouped the houses into two. One of the groups is the houses having tendency to set a relation with nature and other does not have a tendency like that.

In collages, a part of the line of the Mobius band creates more relations with the group having relation with nature, other does not. At the intersection point of the line, the special movements of the strip which is in accordance with the group’s features mutually abandon the point.