The talk by Yiğit Acar is going to focus on one concluded and one on-going competition for the most important public spaces of two major cities of Turkey. The urban design competition for Taksim Square and the ongoing ideas design competition for Ulus 100th Years Commerce Center will be discussed as means of democratizing design.


Competitions have an idiosyncratic role in the history of design disciplines in Turkey. Acquiring the best design proposals for public buildings and spaces through competitions has been a golden standard all through the life of the Republic of Turkey. Among the many debates and confusions of the discipline of architecture in Turkey, producing architecture through competitions is one of the rare instances of dialogue. The architectural competitions have an outstanding potential to steer the ongoing architectural discourses towards a democratic, transparent, egalitarian and idealist way of doing architecture.


Unfortunately, this good habit was “shelved” in the last two decades by the governing bodies, reaping off the architectural community in Turkey the chance to focus on how to utilize this potential further. That said, the recent attempts at restoring the practice of competitions seems to mark the turn of the tide. This talk is going to focus on one concluded and one on-going competition for the most important public spaces of two major cities of Turkey. The urban design competition for Taksim Square and the ongoing ideas design competition for Ulus 100th Years Commerce Center will be evaluated as means of democratizing design.

Biography:

Yiğit Acar received his Ph.D. in Architecture from Middle East Technical University in 2017and has been teaching in Bilkent since then. His research interests include theory of architecture and urbanism, urban design, mapping, data mining and visualization. His current research focuses on disciplinary history of urban design and typo-morphological analysis of Turkish cities.