‘Inhabiting the sky’, a project proposal for the Istanbul Disaster and Prevention Center by LEON11, aims both, to provoke a radical impression over the visitants and to take care of nature. In doing so, their design creates an awareness about sustainability through the understanding that nature is not something that we have to fear, but just to respect and love. To get the main point across of understanding nature by being surrounded by it, they are reaching out to show visitors. Once they get in the center, visitors get the feeling of being surrounded by clouds. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Floating Architecture
The center will be oriented to study nature, not just through screens and new technology, but living with it. Nature wont be a product to study, but a situation to experiment. We state that architecture should not always steal the place for nature and green areas. We think this is the case where this concept should be apply, thinking that a big and public green area will help the city of Istambul to increase the quality of live of citizens and tourists. Nature remains on the base of the plot, being a public area for people, and architecture is floating over it. A new feeling will be developped in two senses, one for people that is underneath to watch the architecture over−flying and the other for people who is in “the building” that is able to watch the city as being in a scenary viewpoint.
Landscape Made of Nature-Human-Technology
In the project the landscape will be as well enough distinctive. Nature, as we already explained will be a main character of the project. Humans, because of the morphology and kind of architecture we propose, human presence will be evident the whole time. The kind of “architecture” we use never makes the feeling of being enclose in a construction, the opposite, it calls to the sensation of being free. The transparency of the mesh that covers the center, makes nothing hide and protect the center for any kind of weather change. Technology is clear in any of the morphologic developments we present. The material and composition of what we call “the cloud” will be one of the biggest challenges of the proposal.
The Main Hall of the Center is a Forest
Introducing the nature in the project with such as character, creates a new typology of Nature−architecture. The hall becomes a forest thanks to nature. “Inhabiting the sky” introduces a new concept to understand the “welcome” area of a public space, creating not a park, nor a public square, but a new kind of space where nature−human and technology works together to build up an atmosphere really authentic and related to the subject that is presented in the center.
Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. The clocks are clean ordered systems that can be used through reductionism and the clouds are a mess epistemic “highly irregular, disordered, more or less unpredictable.” He says as well that the mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we let ourselves be seduced again and again and again by false promises of brain scans and genetic sequences. The morphology of the architecture we produce is related to nature, making an investigation related to different vegetal species.
‘Inhabiting the sky’ presents a challenging proposal where architecture is not just a fashion construction but a dialogue with nature, a goal for researching about sustainability and an engagement with the production of new architecture that will help people to advance for the future and innovation.
