This project interrogates the ways in which agriculture operates not merely as a land-use practice but as a territorializing force that reconfigures space through political, ecological, and economic logics. Found within the context of Aydın, a site historically inscribed by fertility yet increasingly subject to the extractive rationalities of monoculture and global commodity chains, the project uses licorice as a material and epistemological lens. By foregrounding liquorice as both crop and archive, the work traces sedimented histories of cultivation, displacement, and transregional exchange. Aydın emerges as a constructed geography, shaped by infrastructural mandates and market imperatives as much as by oral histories and embodied memory. Through speculative spatial interfaces, the project proposes interruptions to dominant binary classifications—urban/rural, visible/invisible, pixel/vector—advancing a mode of architectural thinking rooted in “licorice thinking”: adaptive, situated, and attuned to translation across scales and disciplines.
Author: Mustafa Çağlak
Studio: ARCH 402 Spring 2025
Instructor(s): Ezgi İşbilen, Yiğit Acar
