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Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Turkey

When we look out anywhere and see light, we can always “see” some matter as the source of the light. We don't just see light. - Richard Feynman. Since its inauguration in 1964 Yapı Kredi Art and Culture Center [YKK], has been one of the only institutions to have continuously hosted exhibitions in Istanbul, increasingly incorporating the work of contemporary Turkish artists into its collection. However, positioned along an ever-evolving pedestrian promenade, YKK has struggled in recent years to recalibrate its urban standing in an area increasingly pushed to become the heart of Istanbul’s nightlife and tourism retail industry.

By transforming this inescapable soundscape into a physichalized facade and synthesized audio performance, the pedestrian experience is transfigured into a more active participation in the urban experience itself. A conceptual paradigm where skin, sound, pedestrian and environment all become agents in the urban condition; questioning the feedback loops that users have with their built environment, and the very agency that buildings and their inhabitants have in the twenty first century.

Grande Rue de Pera [İstiklal Street], which has long been a significant social axis in the heart of Istanbul, has itself bore witness and is a testament to the radical changes that have affected the fabric of Istanbul through urban transformation; its multiplicitous sound- scape of trams clunkily rolling past, “dondurmacılar” beating their bells hung up on brass chains and the overwhelming latency of the three million pedestrians who promenade up and down its 1.4 km stretch each day- the gushing pulse of a city that doesn’t sleep.

DIGITAL FORMATION
Augmented Structures is a transdisciplinary project bringing together the fields of Architecture, Computational Design, Sound Engineering and the Visual Arts.

Field data was collected with continuous quadraphonic sound recordings taken along the tramline. These recordings are translated into a generative model deriving geometries which would culminate in a physical structure affixed on the YKK street front facade; an attempt to curate the palimpsest sound experience into a tangible physical construct.

Inspired by the first major composition scripts of “Metastaseis” from the architect and composer Iannis Xenakis the sound recordings translated in three-dimensional form. We used a scripting method on VVVV and Rhino Grasshopper platforms to translate the wave file into the sound sections. The promenade, Grand Ru Pera (Istiklal Street), is positioned on the facade and characteristic sound sections has been developed into the continuous surface. Further sound details are progressed and mapped on the surface together with responsive animated visuals. The three-dimensional form is produced using digital fabrication techniques in three months’ time. The structure is a hybrid system combines metal tension cables and steel structure together with a tensile membrane on the surface.

A SOCIO-TECHNOLOGICAL PARADIGM
Within the context of the experience age, the integrated workflow of Augmented Structures offers a trajectory, if not only a possibility of the continuous evolution of architectural practice and the correlation of the static tectonics of architecture with the dynamism of evolving technologies in the post digital age. Its articulate surface and evolutionary skin embodying all of the contextual meaning imbued within its architectural tectonic, ultimately informing the reading of the urban condition as a whole, and challenging the active and necessary co-evolution the built environment shares with it inhabitants.