Big Challenges, Small Interventions Panel

Herkes İçin Mimarlık, Studio-X Istanbul, TAK - Tasarım Araştırma Katılım (Moderated by Merve Yücel)

Architecture and design are fields associated with forward momentum, planning, action and construction. Focusing on the city, these practices have the potential to tackle crucial issues such as consensus/dissensus, collaboration, discursive space, spatial politics, and public participation in the built environment. Understanding the city as an active landscape perpetually in formation, this discussion intends to survey the terrain mapped by the speakers in order to identify, describe and to assess the multiple processes and energies that possess the potential to shape the city. Tasarım Araştırma Katılım (TAK)’s catalytic local energy, Studio X Istanbul’s international research laboratory for generating new modes of thinking and Herkes İçin Mimarlık (Architecture For All)’s action-ephemeral constructions for an alternate society, will together portray the myriad of small interventions in order to instigate change. Can we invent new forms and methods through the engagement of new kinds of public processes? Can small-scale interventions aggregate into larger impact?

One Hundred Thousand Solitudes Talk

Tony Chakar

“A hundred profound solitudes together constitute the city of Venice. That is its charm. A model for the men of the future.”
One Hundred Thousand Solitudes examines images that came out of the Arab revolutions and from different Occupy movements throughout the world. These images are singularities, singular moments, that lead to the declaration of the coming of Messianic times - without a Messiah: The dead coming back to life, rivers turning into blood, people speaking in one tongue, the last becoming first, the reversal of historical order, men turning into women and vice versa. These images were not witnessed first hand, but through social media (mainly Facebook and YouTube) – In other words, from deep within our solitude and isolation.