“A Monstrous Alliance - Open Architecture and Common Space” - Footprint Article
Contemporary built environment is bifurcated between public and private spaces. In this restrictive grammar, publicized spaces run the risk of becoming anesthetized under regulatory apparatuses and control mechanisms, while privatized spaces run the risk of catalyzing socio-spatial problems including but not limited to ever-increasing slums, discriminatory gentrifications, and ecological catastrophes. Underneath this dysfunctional bifurcation lies the common space, a third category constituting the shared spatial commonwealth of our nature-culture continuum. An emerging body of constitutive spatial actors, named the multitude–after Baruch Spinoza–has begun to unearth the potentials of common spaces, actualizing novel spatial experiments all around the world.Architects, within these emerging mechanisms of spatial commoning, do not become obsolete, insofar as they abandon their conventional top-down roles, and embrace becoming anomalous, that is, opening architecture to a myriad of new capabilities. This encounter engenders the possibility of a monstrous alliance between anomalous architects and the multitude, between open architectures and the common space.
Two specific case studies accompany these theoretical frameworks: Gezi Event (Istanbul, 2013) demonstrates the actual emancipation of common space with the self-organising activity of the multitude, while Open-Cube (Antalya, 2013) attests to an experiment of open architecture with the potentiating capacities of anomalous architects.
Author: Gökhan Kodalak
Date: Spring 2015
Type: Article
Program: publication, press
Journal: Footprint Delft Architecture Theory Journal
Issue: Issue 16, vol.9, no.1, pp.69-91
Location: Delft, Netherlands
Status: Published
Link: https://issuu.com/aboutblank-istanbul/docs/gk_-_a_monstrous_alliance__2015_
