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.