Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...

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to the site. The public domain is inadequate in serving
a variety of user groups. The HBA is of great aesthetic
value where the original street pattern and vistas are still
preserved. The public spaces in the site, accommodating
two-storey listed buildings with traditional architectural
characteristics particular to Ankara, and monumental
buildings with the architecture of modernisation, have
potentials to provide visual variety and to enhance the
aesthetic quality of the city. Yet, these potentials (thus
the spatial identity) are neglected. Although the site
possesses many historical and cultural layers, much of
these layers are hidden, degraded and lacking a sense
of a unified and legible identity. Finally, the public domain
in the HBA also is not adequately designed, managed
and used in performing its ecological, psychological, and
political functions.
UES ’08 and the general intentions of the student
projects
UES ‘08, organised by METU and the University of Adelaide
as a collaborative exercise in two graduate courses,
and held in Ankara between 30 June and 14 July 2008,
focused on the connection between place and difference.
Its main aims were to raise students’ sensitivity to spatial
and social difference in their experience and design of
constructed environments, and to explore new modes
of design education (UES, 2008). UES ‘08 brought 7
city planning, and 13 architecture students from METU
together with 22 architecture and landscape architecture
students from the University of Adelaide. It focused on
urban matters in the HBA, taking a holistic approach to
dealing with the urban environment that involved design
practices in architecture, landscape architecture, and
urban design (UES, 2008).
Working as international and interdisciplinary teams of 5,
6 and 7, students produced 7 alternative projects with a
number of creative solutions for the problems of the HBA
public domain. Each project team developed a master
plan for the whole project site and detailed design solutions
for a specific part of the HBA. Group 1, for example,
claimed that although the HBA is one of the prominent
religious and historical points of Ankara, it is disjointed,
degraded and lacking a sense of a unified and legible
identity with its current state. They therefore focused
on developing the heart of the HBA, the site around the
Mosque and the Temple, while providing strong contextual
linkages through the development of pedestrian roads
and a green corridor which would help the revitalisation
of the residential districts in the project site (Figure 3).
Group 1 proposed to dig down into the strata by creating
an underground museum showcasing the historical
development of Ankara, while transforming the degraded
upper layer into an urban garden. In this way, they aim
to reveal, celebrate and conserve the past layers of the
city while adding a layer for the future. Group 3, aiming
to turn the HBA into a site which would maintain traditional,
religious and historical values, proposed to create a
new central hub linked to three distinct places; the Haci
Bayram Square, the proposed minibus station and the residential
site to the north. This new hub adjoining a green
corridor along the north-east, east and south-east edges
of the HBA, would help not only the revitalisation of the
edges of the project site, but also the transition between
the spaces and the cooperation with the critical form of
the topography. Group 5 opted to create an open-air city
museum with the idea of restoring the memory of future
rather than past. The group developed their detail design
proposals on 4 main sites; the Government Square which
was converted into a pedestrian site by bringing up the
Roman ruins, the Haci Bayram Square which was redesigned
as a public and religious space, the Roman Road
that turned into a pedestrian route linking different layers
of times, functions and fragmented characters of the site,
and adjoining a city library specialised on the Ankara
history, an underground passage exhibiting the Roman
ruins and ending up at the Roman Amphitheatre, and
the neighbourhood to the north where five PODs were
suggested as the tools for revitalisation.
Figure 3: The master plans of Group 1 (left) and Group 3 (right)