ARCH 201 : Vertical Circulation

• OMA, Maison a Bordeaux, France, 1998
• Li Xiaodong, Liyuan Library, Beijing, China, 2011
• Drmm, Endless Stairs, London, 2013

ARCH 201 : Photomontage of Eymir Lake

ARCH 221 : Polis And Akropolis

Athens has a unique place in human history. As the people who started the arts of history, philosophy and theatre, who enterprise the first radical model of democracy, and who achieve successful stage in architecture, sculpture and pottery, the Athenians have rightly acquired an almost legendary status. The other important issue that the intervention of the Spartans accelerated progress of Athen’s democracy.

The meaning of Polis is ‘city’ in Greek terminology and it can also be body of citizens. In order to understand meaning of Polis, Socrates and Plato notice that. Plato tried to analyse the structure of Polis. According to Plato, there are five main basis and economic classes of Polis which are producers, merchants, sailors, retail traders, wage earners. Socrates tried to understand the economic structure of an ideal polis.

If we look at the old cities, widespread outlines of houses and individual rooms were irregular but some cities which are consciously planned, had uniformly blocks and houses separated regularly. The public open spaces provided multipurpose gathering place of the new citizens. After a while, normative grid appeared. Thanks to grid, there was a way to divide the land, shape the structure of the city. The method of orthogonal planning is of course as old as Egypt. ‘Per strigas’ was the accomplishment of the Greek’s that settlement buildings were regularly organized blocks but none of the pre-Greek grids could be fully coordinated system of public.

The stoa had particular feature especially temple as Greek building type. It is much more flexible in form and function. The stoa during the antiquity had shops that where leased by the State of Athens. The stoa is a large-scale building. It has two floors: the ground floor belongs to the Doric style and the first floor to the Ionic style, the two levels are connected by two staircases located at the ends of the building.

Acropolis in Greek literally means “the highest point of the town”. Location of some specific buildings is uncertain but these are close to the agora. After two centuries, there is some development like size, full system of democracy etc. The Skias has some properties and unusual form that solid, circular wall, second door on the north side, adjoining kitchen, groups of columns. At the end of the fifth century, the main innovation was to fit a semicircular auditorium into the outer rectangle. Natural slopes as auditoria is ancient.

ARCH 201 : Missed Your Instance

This model has connection with instance model which is related to last year. I tried to use linearity and apply human scale. Especially, this model includes small size of volume because my instance has the same rule. I tried to create semi-close spaces.

ARCH 221: The Architecture of Ancient Egypt

In this week, the subject of the text is Ancient Egypt. Egyptians were indigenous people. They weren’t isolated from Mediterranean people and they traded with western Asia. In Mesopotamia, the village life of farming and animal husbandry were initial step. These people dwelled near the river. Neolithic village had two broad polities which are Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. These two kind of Egypt had a separate ruler and capital.

Egyptians interested with monumental architecture and their one of the characteristic sight conservatism or always continue between innovation and tradition. Egyptian buildings displayed great advances. Saqqara and Giza are important palaces in order to use as tombs in brick.

The Nile in fact was great axis and had importance for Egypt because it is was main way to approach cities. There is interesting issue that except for the Delta folk, Egyptians didn’t know circular horizon because of the rising and setting up. In Egypt, geometric master plans were unique. There were so-called pyramid cities created by individual pharaohs.

The other important issue is Imphoter who was Zoser Pyramid’s architecture. According to text, he had working methods that the design process would appear to have combined a simple overall geometric system and the use of a set module to derive the dimensions of the building. So,  Zoser has rectangular structure.

Zoser’s Pyramid was the first pyramid and the blocks used are small throughout, more in the measure of brick than cut stone. This pyramid’s shape was stepped and Zoser’s body stood on high ground in the middle. Mastaba was other significant thing that stone was placed over it and enlarged three times in the course of construction.

The pyramids of Giza had mysteries and these pyramids consisted of 3 parts which are Cheops, Chepren and Mykerinos. The most well-known and the oldest, widest pyramid was Cheops. Because of the process, Giza pyramids had a complex structure. Giza pyramids was a hope for Egyptians.

After a while, Egyptians started to compare their King with Gods and citizens believe that king are more superior than Gods. In order to worship Ra, people wanted to build more pyramids.