To be traveling through the middle of a city as great, historic and forlorn as Istanbul, and yet to feel the freedom of the open sea — that is the thrill of a trip along the Bosphorus.

Orhan Pamuk

My project is focused on the Bosphorus and its relationships with the city. They seem to be as liquid as the waters of the Strait. The way to explore it a floating laboratory was set up. Since the Strait is sensed in motion, it’s always on the move. Its goal is to investigate continuity and connectivity of City- Strait links and make new connections between these two.

An old barge was converted into living space occupied by members of Autonomus floating community. Thinking of the Community as a small city is a useful way to understand its organization. .The Community

tries to use the freedom of the Sea which means it falls outside the legislation of existing countries. It’s a new society of sea pioneers. In their quest for independence they reveal an important fact: legislation is not absolute. The laws on water are different from those on land. If you build on water you come up against issues needing clarification and conflicting interests. These uncertainties ultimately lead to new regulations. But until these rules are in place, the strangest things are imaginable.

Bosphorus Laboratory is part of the Autonomous floating community

Laboratory mission The Lab’s primary mission is urban space reactivation ashore and at sea alike all along the Bosphorus. Set of experiments are to be done to work out rules and tools for such urban interventions to be implemented. The central element of the Lab is its Activating Research Module (ARM) interacting with environment.

Laboratory organization When fully manned, The Lab is home to around 30 personnel. At the top is the Lab’s Visionary, who is ultimately responsible for accomplishment of its assigned mission. The Lab’s individual functions are handled by several lab’s unit.

Lab units

1. Activating Research Module (ARM) unit The Activating unit works onto the mobile Research Module. This unit is in charge of construction, transformation, disembarking and landing the module, charging, moving, and controlling fixed and variable module components.

2. Operations unit The Operations unit is responsible for collecting, cataloging, analyzing and distributing information vital to the accomplishment of the Lab’s missions. Heading this very important department is the Lab’s Operations Master.

3. Communications unit The Communications Department sends and receives messages to and from other labs and shore facilities via various sophisticated electronic equipment. Such equipment includes computers, satellites, ets.

4. Navigation unit The head is a Navigation Master. He briefs the Lab’s members on the position of the Lab, the direction of travel and approves places of mooring for urban interventions.

Tophane, which has been used as a harbor since the time of the Genoese, used to be the first place where foreigners who came to the city by sea touched land. Usually they traveled up from the harbor to Beyoglu. For this reason, the climb up the hilly road attaching Tophane to Cihangir and Galatasaray is today known as the “Italian slope.”

Stablemen and their horses used to wait near Tophane wharf to take them on their joumey. Thus Tophane served as an informal reception area for these arriving foreigners, who upon their first visit must have been impressed upon gazing at the panoramic view, the centuries-old mosques, Ottoman women waiting by the fountain to fill their jugs, street sellers and small shops selling exotic goods. This characteristic of the district lasted even into the early Republican years. However, the harbor lost some of its allure due to the bonded warehouses built in the region in the 1960s. Today, one of those warehouses is Turkey's first modern art museum.

This is an extract from the book by Kevin Lynch 'The image of the city'. These are the categories of direct interest in design, since they describe qualities that a designer may operate upon.

A spacial region could only be experienced, as a patterned play of spacial changes, by a rather protracted journey through it. Perhaps the processional courts of Peking, or the canal spaces of Amsterdam have this quality. Presumably they evoke an image of great power.

Motion awareness: the qualities which make sensible to the observer, through both visual and kinesthetic senses, his own actual or potential motion. Such are devices which improve the clarity of slopes, curves, and interpenetrations; give the experience of motion parallax and perspective; maintain consistency of direction or direction change; or make visible the distance interval. Since a city is sensed in motion, these qualities are fundamental, and they are used to structure and identify, wherever they are coherent enough to make it possible. These qualities reinforce and develop what an observer can do to interpret direction or distance, and to sense form in motion itself.

Continuity: continuance of edge or surface; nearness of parts; repetition or rhythmic intervals; similarity, analogy or harmony of surface, form or use. These are the qualities that facilitate the perception of a complex physical reality as one or as interrelated, the quality which suggest the bestowing of single identity.

Directional Differentiation: asymmetries, gradients, radial references which differentiate one end from another (as on a path going uphill, away from the sea, and toward the center); or one side from another ( as with buildings fronting a park); or one compass direction from another ( as by the sunlight). These qualities are heavily used in structuring on the larger scale.

Visual Scope: qualities which increase the range and penetration of vision, either actually or symbolically. These include transparencies (as with glass or buildings on stilts); overlaps (as when structures appears behind others); vistas and panoramas which increase the depth of vision (as on axial streets, broad open space, high views); articulating elements (foci, measuring rods, penetrating objects) which visually explain a space; concavity (as of background hill or curving streets) which exposes father objects to view; clues which speak of an element otherwise invisible (as the sight of activity which is a characteristic of a region to come, or the use of characteristic detail to hint at the proximity of another element). All these related qualities facilitate the grasping of a vast and complex whole by increasing, as it were the efficiency of vision; its range, penetration, and resolving power.

Time series: series which are sensed over time, including both simle item by item linkages, where one element is simply knitted to the two elements before and behind it (as in a casual sequence of detailed landmarks), and also series which are truly structures in time and thus melodic in nature (as if the landmarks would increase in intensity of form until the climax point were reached). The former (simply sequence) is commonly used, particularly along familiar paths. Its melodic counterpart is more rarely seen, but may be most important to develop in the large, dynamic, modern metropolis.

Mary Miss has reshaped the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, landscape design, and installation art by articulating a vision of the public sphere where it is possible for an artist to address the issues of our time. She has developed the “City as Living Lab”, a framework for making issues of sustainability tangible through collaboration and the arts.

City as Living Laboratory: Sustainability Made Tangible Through the Arts is a new initiative developed by artist Mary Miss and Marda Kirn of Eco Arts Connections for making issues of sustainability compelling to the public. In thinking of the city as a laboratory, a collaborative process is envisioned amongst planners, scientists, artists and designers where a city's sustainability plans become tangible to its citizens.

Broadway: 1000 Steps is an implementation of the City as Living Laboratory framework. This project imagines establishing Broadway as the new “green” face of New York City, announcing in an immediate way to citizens and visitors alike that the city is in the process of re-envisioning itself through PlaNYC as a sustainable place for living, working, and entertainment.

The first phase of this effort is the selection of hubs of infrastructure, institutions, and subject matter along Broadway.Seeding these hubs with installations, projects and events will set an example that can extend to other streets and spaces throughout the city over time. The work will occur in multiple layers and will be undertaken in collaboration with scientists and city agencies.

http://artspire.org/DirectoryDetail/tabid/95/id/642/Default.aspx

A walkway overhanging the edge of the pond makes it possible to move out over the water. Proceeding around the water’s edge a ramp disappears into the water after getting the visitor down to the level of the pond.

A large leaf shaped space is outlined by these structures affirming and making palpable the connection between the land and water.

www.marymiss.com

Storm King Director and Curator David Collens notes, “Maya Lin has created a magnificent addition to the Art Center’s collection of post-war sculpture, one that establishes an engaging dialogue with other works. In addition, she produced the wavefield in the most environmentally sensitive manner, beginning with materials that were already on site and adding only topsoil and low-impact grasses.”

Kevin O’Dwyer

While walking in Boora on a winter’s afternoon, I was fascinated by the strong directional light and the shadows it cast on this unencumbered landscape. I decided to use a series of equilateral triangles of decreasing size that would cast shadows on the landscape and interact with each other as the sun moved during the morning and evening hours.

The sculpture was fabricated from materials long associated with the industrial heritage of the cutaway bog- railway track, railway sleepers and steel plate. Two of the triangular forms were made from oak sleepers bolted to a steel armature; the sleepers were recently removed from a disused bog train railway line laid in the 1950’s. The wood triangles symbolised the old use of the bog. The centre triangle was made from stainless steel and symbolises the new use of the Parklands. The triangular icons are held in place using railway track, which once facilitated the movement of peat to the Ferbane power station by the bog train.

Julian Wild to make "System No.30" for Sculpture in the Parklands

Over the last 2 years Julian has gleaned pieces of metal scrap from the Bord na Mona workshops in Lough Boora. He sees the process as a kind of archaeology in which each old cog and piece of metal tells part of the story of the industrial heritage of the site.Welding these scraps of peat wagons and cutting machinery together, the artist will construct an 18 metre long sculpture in a canal at the site. The concept is to create a disk that appears to bounce over the surface of the canal, like a skimming stone.

http://www.sculptureintheparklands.com/

De Groene Kathedraal is transformed to its original source of inspiration. This cathedral symbolises the desire to ascend towards divinity, leaving earthly matters behind like a modern day Icarus. In the same way that the artist longs to remove himself from tradition.

Antony Gormley

it is for the first time in Flevoland's Land Art tradition that a figurative scupture comments on the polder landscape without making use of elements from nature. Also, this work is uniquely located sitting on the interface between land and water in an urban setting.

One of the greatest Spanish mystics and poets, Juan de la Cruz (1542 - 1591) inspired Libeskind for his work in Almere with his poem The living flame of love. In Polderland Garden of Love and Fire the lines interconnect people in different places and times. The three canals symbolize the imaginary connection between three cities: Salamanca, the city where Juan de la Cruz studied, Berlin, where Libeskind lived and worked at the time, and Almere, the place where the artwork is located.

This beautiful 'monster' is made by the couple Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, together with invited friends. It acts as a sculpture, theater requisite and performance at the same time.It's body is organized around a single 'Promenade Architectural', which is guiding people up and down through the installation, giving away views to the surrounding and into it's art collection.A ball track is running through the entire piece. It seems to visualize the promenade and to stimulate people entering.

www.lecyclop.com

The landscape around Kielder Water & Forest Park (KW&FP) has become home to a unique collection of visual art and architecture, inspiring the creation of work in response to the scale and complexity of its unique environment and the area's varied and fascinating history.

The abundance of contemporary art and architecture in this striking rural setting makes public art accessible to all visitors and is located at sites around the lake and within the forest.

http://www.visitkielder.com/site/things-to-do/art-and-architecture

The physicality of Dani Karavan creative process is matched to the site: ‘to feel, to listen, to smell, to touch, to walk through’. With Passages, Homage to Walter Benjamin, 1990-94, Karavan reached a sublime point of relationship between place (the cultural theorist Benjamin committed suicide at the site), text (some of Benjamin’s own words) and life, in the form of a single carefully-sited olive tree.

LIGHT&ART

In Japanese, the word 'chichu' means 'underground' and one would, therefore, tend to imagine a dark, dim space where natural light is cut off. Although part of the access way and the front lobby are extremely dark, the main exhibition space brings in natural light creatively through the two main, geometrically shaped, sunken courts. This is, rather, an 'enclosed above-ground museum'.

The south side of the island where the museum is located is part of the Seto Inland Sea national Park. The museum is in the cliff the overlook the straits of the Seto Inland Sea.

‘The Portal’, which was created by Russian artists, Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, forms the entrance to the Europese Keramisch Werkcentrum (European Ceramics Center), located in the former coffee roasting house, ‘De drie mollen’ on the Willemsvaart in ‘s-Hertogenbosch

http://www.mimdap.org/w/?p=4580

http://www.alptekinbaloglu.com/

Sometimes, as you move through a city of 17 million people, all you want is a wide open green space, where you can go and not hear cars/musicians/people and not see concrete block buildings. This can be hard to find in a city so large, but luckily Istanbul still has an entire forest within its borders, somewhat easily accessible: Belgrade Forest.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~tsa/Treasures/Grvr/1.html

When in your caïque upon the Bosphorus you have passed the Tower of Leander, you see opposite Scutari an immense, unfinished palace that bathes its white feet in the blue and rapid waters. There is a superstition in the East, supported by the architects, that no one dies while the house he is having built is uncompleted; therefore the Sultans always take care to have some palace on hand.

http://www.elfinspell.com/RomanticCastles/Bosphorus.html

List of Istanbul Festivals

In Festivals, Info, Lists on Haziran 12, 2010 at 7:15 pmIstanbul, the cultural center between the east and west, hosts many local and international festivals every year. Some of the most well-known festivals are International Istanbul Film Festival, Theatre Festival, Music Festival, Jazz Festival, Efes Pilsen Blues Festival, Istanbul Poetry Festival…

• International Istanbul Short Film Festival www.istanbulfilmfestival.com
• International Istanbul Tango Festival www.istanbultangofestival.com
• International Istanbul Poetry Festival www.istanbulsiirfestivali.org
• International Istanbul Film Festival www.iksv.org/film/
• International Istanbul Music Festival www.iksv.org/muzik/
• International Istanbul Biennial www.iksv.org/bienal11/
• International Istanbul Independent Films Festival 2009.ifistanbul.com
• International Istanbul Jazz Festival www.iksv.org/caz/
• International Istanbul Architecture and Urban Films Festival www.archfilmfest.org
• International Istanbul Theatre Festival www.iksv.org/tiyatro/
• International Istanbul Animation Festival www.iafistanbul.com
• International Istanbul Children’s Film Festival www.iicff.com
• International Istanbul Gastroomy Festival www.istanbulgastronomyfestival.com
• International Istanbul Ülker Puppet Festival www.ulkerkuklafestivali.com
• International Istanbul Balloon Festival www.iibfestival.org
• International Istanbul Cartoon Festival
• International Istanbul Contemporary Dance & Performance Festival www.idans.info
• International Istanbul Documentary Films Festival www.1001belgesel.net
• Videoist Festival www.videoist.org
• Filmmor Women’s Films Festival www.flmmor.org
• Akbank Jazz Festival www.akbanksanat.com
• Efes Pilsen Blues Festival www.efesblues.com
• Efes Pilsen One Love Festival www.efespilsenonelove.com
• Istanbul Architecture Festival www.mimarlikfestivali.com
• Istanbul Rock Festival www.istanbulrockfestivali.com
• Barışarock Rock Festival www.barisarock.org
• Rockncoke Rock Festival www.rockncoke.com
• Unirock Open Air Festival www.unirockfest.com
• Istanbul Young Photographers Festival www.ifsak.org
• Istanbul Photograph Days www.ifsak.org
• Pera Piano / Guitar / Flamenco Festival www.perasanat.com.tr
• Istanbul Tulip Festival www.istanbulunlalesi.com/

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