Bedazzled by her incredible energy and her multi-layered, multi-cultured allure, the eyes of the world are fixed on Istanbul. In all design meetings, events, exhibitions and discussion platforms happening in Istanbul, we can follow the trail of the same discourse: to activate the city’s creative energies and to be a part of the global design network through a ‘brand new language’. How connected are those myths – in which we are always willing to believe – and actual phenomena? Distancing ourselves from the elitist circles and just levelling with the realities of daily life, is design really an issue on the agenda of Istanbul?

The discourse of the media consists of a rhetorical relationship with daily life. It is possible to get an idea about how deeply a country or a city has internalized the culture of architecture and design, by observing the general state of its publications. Publishing in the area of design and architecture has its problems in Turkey. The political and ecnomical cross-relations of the media bosses who engage in various different commercial practices other than the press, have an extremely decisive influence on publishing policies. Spellbound by popular culture, mainstream media in general, and decoration magazines especially, handle design in terms of its consumption value, merely as a life-style issue and offer very little room for an interrogative, critical and oppositional perspective and expression.

We are talking about a system removed from deep thinking processes, shaped by the manipulative character of mass culture, and that glorifies the act of “looking” instead of “reading”. Even though there are a great number of people who write and express an opinion about design and architecture, very few adopt a critical stance. The most apparent reason for this is the fact that most of the publications are commercial in nature, with their livelihood dependent on sales and advertising. Consequently, the publishers and editors find themselves tongue-tied when it comes to criticizing the very system that feeds them. Now, the boundaries between information and news are a lot less defined. The media blame their inability to give accurate information and their lack of critical perspective on issues related to advertising and number of prints, thus transferring the responsibility on to the reader or the viewer with the excuse that they are responding to the expectations of the targeted masses. (i)

As the traditional media in Turkey transform into a self-devouring monster like the mythological figure of Erysichton, architecture periodicals, academical publications and newspapers – even though they contribute to the accumulation of intellectual knowledge – are devoid of the power to manipulate the architecture and design climate. Arkitera, Yapı Endüstri Merkezi, Tasarım Yayıncılık and Depo, the publisher of the magazine XXI and the newspaper YeniMimar make up the leading quartet of architecture and design publishing. Arredamento Mimarlık, the prestigious magazine title of Boyut Yayınları and certain digital platforms such as Dexigner and Mimdap are struggling to survive on their own means. Having promoted itself as a magazine with a critical outlook, the British born Icon magazine was forced to meet its unfortunate end after a brief two-year run and was finally buried in the dark recesses of the history of magazine publishing.

Borrowing from Barthes’ definition of the consumer culture, we are living in a world where we create “contemporary mythologies” and the publications that constitute the institutional climate of this process are working towards “the creation of a design mythology rather than a design culture” (ii). And those publications that orient themselves towards arousing “excitement” and “emotion” through the use of visual imagery are a part of this mythology. As Bernard Tschumi points out; “There is no way to perform architecture in a book. Words and drawings can only produce paper space, not the experience of real space.” So the main function of magazines and publications is to advertise architecture and convince the reader.

New technologies enable individuals to build platforms for exchange and to engage in the practice of personal publishing. Activists such as the TAG Platform and a great number of bloggers are raising their voices a little more each day. Sector-specific and sponsored magazines, digital publications and web blogs are also capable of creating an agenda, move away from the elitist niche they are trapped in and address a larger audience but their approach is nowhere near critical enough. As a result, web blogs fail to contribute towards raising the quality of architecture or design production.

Ultimately there is a serious gap between the real and the presented phenomena. Whether it is within popular culture or high-brow culture, architecture and design – even though they are matters of debate – do not infiltrate the public arena and daily life. So how can we build a common and correct perception in the public arena? A paradoxical proposition would be to suggest that the responsibility to create a cultural understanding of architecture and design in Turkey lies again with the media. On the condition that this media isolates itself completely from cross-dialogues with the advertisers, remains neutral and participatory (iii).

The biennial is heading towards “the spatial practice of democracy” not only through its exhibitions but also with its publications. New City Reader, the street paper of the Istanbul Design Biennial offers an interesting experience in terms of transporting the design phenomenon beyond social media exchanges into the public spaces and therefore introducing opportunities for debating ideas born from different fields. It is a public newspaper like the ‘dazebao’s of the Chinese revolution, where the facts and phenomena are communicated loudly and clearly through the voice of “street writings”. It is a newspaper designed not to be “1ooked at” but “read” and shared. The free flow of knowledge contributed by different participants into a democratic space through this wall-newspaper could well be a driving force to activate the rising of critical culture, could it not?

Jürgen Habermas’s concept of public space defined an ideal environment which was too good to be true. This is a new way of translating this ideal into the language of modern times and reach a consensus, even with the presence of the old players of the public space of mainstream media still lurking in the shadows. Because we really need mind-opening intellectual platforms. We must write more wisely for a larger audience. We don’t need more publications enticing the readers with glossy images, but a more critical outlook and attitude.

– Benan Kapucu

[i] Yaylalı, Hale; Kapucu, B ve L.N.E. Arıburun, “Development and Problems of the Turkish Design Media in the Context of the Crisis”, ITU IV. National Design Congress: Design or Crisis, Istanbul, 8-10 Oct 2009 / ed. H.Alpay Er [and oth.] Istanbul: ITU Department of Industrial Product Design, 2009.

[ii] Bağlı, Hümanur. “The Press as the Creator and Transformer of the Discourse of Design in Turkey” III. National Design Congress: Discussing Design in Turkey, Istanbul, 19-22 June 2006 / ed. H.Alpay Er [and oth.] Istanbul: ITU Department of Industrial Product Design, 2006.

[iii] Kapucu, B. ve L.N.E. Arıburun, “The Role of Publishing in the Transference of the Design Culture”, III. National Design Congress: Discussing Design in Turkey, Istanbul, 19-22 June 2006 / ed. H.Alpay Er [and oth.] Istanbul: ITU Department of Industrial Product Design, 2006.

What is the role of a design biennial if design and its attached discourse are overwhelmed in a city such as Istanbul, a contested urban space but also a city under the perverse light of global glamour. How can we use the biennial as a tool for generating critical discussion, and how would that discussion relate to the everyday life and politics of design? Being different from fairs or exhibitions, a biennial’s purpose is to bring a climate of stimulating concepts, to reveal the productive trans-local network of actors, and to create platforms for encounters and debate. However, we also know that such biennial structures often become “institutions” as part of the cultural consumption industry of cities, an element which can fall prey to exploitation by neoliberal governing.

This translates into satisfying the urban elites by using these events as tools that contribute to the urban marketing machine, and feeding the expanding glamorous bubble of Istanbul. There are several ways of exhibition making, thus curatorial practices– a critical awareness that shouldn’t function as a pedagogic or didactic tool but an instigator of potentialities and positioning by initiating rhizomatic self-reflexive networks, and introducing the “non-representable” or the “incomplete representation of form.” These would help.

Nowadays, at the urban and local level, Istanbul is facing controversial design projects initiated by the state and greater municipality. On the other hand, at the global scale, Istanbul’s critical discussion both on representation, and the form of design and architecture is completely backwards. Open-source and collaborative design practices, which are more in touch with everyday life, are nearly impossible. In the context of architecture and urbanism, Istanbul’s public spaces are getting privatized in the hands of either fictional historical construction, or gentrification via the introduction of new consumption spaces. Unfortunately, design remains as an instrumentalized element that justifies the conditions of exception. The projects which we’ve been witnessing emerge in the last years, such as state-led urban transformation projects for neighborhoods (in collaboration with TOKİ), the Galataport project in Tophane-Karaköy, the transformation of the Emek Cinema building, or the recently presented, upcoming project for Taksim Square are all initiated for the purpose of privatizing public space, adding new surveillance measures and transforming everyday life by reducing the collective imaginary. Instrumentilizing design via upside-down projects and reducing the potentialities of the city also affect our understanding of urban production. This neoliberal urban production influences directly any level or form of design. The craftsmen of Tophane who suffered the strong gentrification process of the area find themselves in a similar condition to that of small architecture offices, which are squeezed under huge generic architecture projects. The discontinuity between the shifts in manual labor and immaterial labor, the division of labor in design, and its growing distance from everyday life, lead us to re-think form and the means of production. For thinkers such as M. Lazaratto and R. Sennet, ‘networks’ are an important element of work dynamics and means of production. Labor, division of labor and subjectivity are redefined not only through the network itself but also through the rhizomatic expansion and reproduction of the network. Under the pressure of neoliberalism, analyzing critically the means of production and thus the conventional production of design might give us the ability to invent counter strategies and new gestures in design. Moreover, the role of the designer or the architect in a city like Istanbul remains ambivalent.
 
Under these conditions, the biennial can become a critical tool which can pursue with a research-based collaborative curatorial practice, the true resources and potentialities of Istanbul, many of which are under threat. These resources could be analyzed and presented within the reinvention of emancipatory networks– a level of understanding made possible by going beyond the Istanbul urban cliché or its identity based on the glamour bubble. This approach would lead us to rediscover forms of design networks, critical modalities on forms in everyday life, and perhaps also levels of advocacy as a moderator.
 
Recent biennials such as the Hong Kong + Shenzen Architecture, or the Gwangju Design biennials are examples of events which provide global discursive platforms and new analysis on the design form within the context of politics and socio-economical situations. Throughout their exhibitions, their critical climate goes beyond to understand spatial practices and potentialities, making them the foundation under any kind of design form or designer. Architect Nikoulaus Hirsh has described the recent global condition of Istanbul in the context of cultural industry as such: ‘’Istanbul has definitely moved on the map of the art and design world. Art and design have become triggers for urban transformation.” The stakes are high, therefore in the case of Istanbul, there is a choice to be made. Either the biennial can resemble and contribute to the glamorous bubble of urban marketing, or it can initiate scenarios for urban and design networks of the trans-local scale, allowing them to become actors of critical modality in design. This choice could mark the climate of thinking on design and architecture, and their role in society and politics.
 
– Pelin Tan

1- Maurizio Lazaratto, Gayrimaddi Emek / Immaterial Labor, Muhtelif guncel sanat dergisi / contemporary art magazine, Eds.Pelin Tan, Adnan Yıldız, Ahmet Öğüt, 2008, no.4, Autumn, Istanbul

2- Richard Senett, Karakter Aşınması: Yeni Kapitalizmde İşin Kişilik Üzerindeki Etkileri, Trans.Barış Yıldırım, Ayrıntı Pub., 2002, Istanbul (The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in The New Capitalism, 1998)

OpenStructures CoffeeMaker

Looking at the contemporary state of the design discipline, it’s safe to say that we’re observing a boom of new practices which are making the field return to an open, collaborative, system-oriented approach: flying drones which create temporary wifi networks in isolated areas; DIY construction kits; manufacturing at home through personal 3D printers; a Wikihouse with open-source plans that can be replicated, improved and updated anywhere; and countless other examples. These unconventional projects respond to a need of “going beyond” the traditional flow of making things, and are representative of the deep transformations occurring in industry. With an incredible amount of interesting stories coming from forward-thinking collectives to individuals, from hackers to artists and activists, the term design has come to embody only a fragment of what is being produced — our aim with Adhocracy is to bridge that ideological gap and spark the discussion for an updated definition of what design means.

The collaborative nature of human culture is by no means a new element. Arts like cooking, weaving, and tool-making are examples of timeless fruits of the human civilization, and testaments to our capacity as social creators. It has been through indiscriminate collaboration, spontaneous tinkering, and gradual evolution that varieties within each of these arts spawned. This flux in authorship has been the status quo for millennia, and has created generations of creative production, expressive of the culture in which they’re born, instead of the creative genius of single individuals. A crucial difference in methodology was also the focus on technique and process instead of the final object — a focus in the making, rather than the made —, and a personal relationship between creator, user and object. The latter has changed dramatically with the advent of serial production and industrial scale design.

Things get interesting when we realize that there are now more tools than ever before, bringing more people together from all four corners of the world, in order to create more things and more variations of those things, in an apparently spontaneous way. This ad-hoc methodology is made possible by self-organized communities and the new communication methods which have emerged in recent years. The results are often out of the left field in their creativity and impressive in their accomplishment, whilst fundamentally democratic and empowering. This way of thinking was born and remained strictly the domain of the coding world for decades, where commodities can be replicated perfectly and infinitely, without taking away value from the original. This spawned the open-source movements alongside the hackers and crackers who would take code apart to rebuild it. What we are seeing are these elements of open-source ideology — so far strictly limited to the digital world — spilling into the analogue world of things. What will happen when you can design, draw and print your own idea easily or personalize mass produced objects, taking them apart and remixing them? What will happen if we go beyond, and instead of objects, we design, draw and print our ideal cities?

A key to understanding the repercussions of this shift is to understand the motivations behind the rise of a new DIY movement, an ideology revitalized with the introduction of massive collaboration and information sharing made possible by the internet– we are seeing the emergence of Do-It-With-Others(-For-Yourself). Design critic Avinash Rajagopal points out how a 2006 analysis of this phenomenon by historian Paul Atkinson indicated four categories of do-it-yourselfers. “Pro-active DIY, which is the manipulation of raw materials or original compositions, motivated by  ‘personal pleasure or financial gain;’ Reactive DIY, which is ‘mediated through the agency of kits, templates or patterns, … where the motivation might range from occupation of spare time to personal pleasure;’ Essential DIY, which is ‘carried out as an economic necessity or because of the unavailability of professional labor;’ and Lifestyle DIY, activities undertaken as emulation or conspicuous consumption, ‘where the use of one’s labor is by choice rather than need.’ DIYers of different categories live in a symbiotic relationship with one another, in a rhizomatic, multilayered web of relationships.

Adhocracy will analyze and interpret these kinds of relationships, surveying the causes and effects of their success or demise. We wish to make the Galata Greek School a live laboratory— a platform where different creators, collectives, and projects can mix and remix ideas, giving them the space to interact and the voice to collaboratively show the effectiveness of open-source and free design (free as in free speech, not free beer.)

- Ethel Baraona Pohl & Elian Stefa

NCR Locations NCR01

From the pages of NCR-01 comes a text by Kazys Varnelis, co-founder of the New City Reader.

——————-

That two theorists of architecture launched the New City Reader in the fall of 2010 could have been another flight of Glaukus, the Owl of Minerva, who Hegel said spreads her wings at dusk, referring to how philosophy explains a form of life only when that form has grown old. What could possibly be new about a physical newspaper in this day and age? In contrast, “the Last Newspaper,” the show we were commissioned to make the paper for, seemed more in touch with current conditions, its title promising a postmortem.

Still, it was this very transition from print to digital that we hoped to explore by interrogating the materiality of the dying medium of print. Both newspapers and portable networked media devices such as smart phones and tablets are physical objects. But the latter do not reveal anything about their user except perhaps one’s ability to expend disposable income on technology and one’s allegiance to a technology corporation fandom.

Newspapers, in contrast, identify you. Reading one telegraphs the political implications of reading in space. When an adult opens one at the breakfast table, it signifies to children that news is important, something one attends to as a citizen. Reading a newspaper is not reading one’s e-mail for pleasure or profit. It is an engagement with the news, a declaration of interest in public matters. It is hardly an accident that reading has universally been a precondition of the right to vote, and that mass democracy could only take hold after mass literacy. Reading a newspaper in public, or even carrying it in public identifies you as a member of a community, often betraying your political affiliation and even, in the case of papers addressing a diaspora, your ethnicity. Newspapers are not just a public matter, common to all, they are a matter of diverse publics, joined by the common experience of reading the paper, an experience reinforced by the appearance of papers in the public realm. Reading a newspaper in public is a provocation, a call to action, to at least bury one’s nose in a newspaper of one’s own.

In contrast, the means by which we read the news on networked media devices reinforce our niches. Politics is invisible, the experience private. Prompted by the ease of sharing, we post articles onto social media sites, but in doing so we only reinforce the beliefs of those around us, people with whom we have chosen to network.

With the New City Reader, we sought to return to an older practice of reading newspapers, posting them in public and, in so doing, taking advantage of the newspaper as a graphic surface. Posting newspapers on walls was common in New York outside of newspaper offices in the nineteenth century and still exists in many countries which have either government run newspapers and large populations of poor people who cannot afford to purchase newspapers outright. We thought that the sharing that such newspapers created was worth investigating in depth. We set out to to find some two dozen sites in which we could publicly hang the papers. Unfortunately, we found this easier said than done. New York city levels $35,000 in fines for posting materials in public with a permit—and these proved difficult to obtain—and our original plan to post papers on temporary walls around construction sites turned out to risk angering those organized crime entities with connections to the construction industry. Posting in public, it turned out, already had an agenda, one of money and danger. Thus, the first New City Reader inadvertently wound up reinforcing our own niche, being posted in the façades of the New Museum and Storefront for Art and Architecture, as well as on the walls of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Pratt, and even the School of Architecture at the University of Limerick.

Despite our failure to paper the city with news, we felt that our interrogation of the materiality of the newspaper was a success. We understood newspapers as we never had before and just perhaps, thought that our readers might have learned something new as well.

It is a great delight that Istanbul has become the second city to host the New City Reader. In founding the paper, Joseph and I intended that it would become itinerate and extend its surface across the globe. In doing so, it may be that the New City Reader reminds us that the materiality of newsprint is the overlooked strength of the newspaper. No matter how convenient digital music is, vinyl is experiencing a resurgence as a new generation discovers how much better it sounds than low quality digital formats. Of course contemporary vinyl is pressed much more carefully than in the past when record companies took it for granted. What better, in the face of the challenge from new media, than for newspapers to do the same? Alas, given the moribund nature of most existing publishers, this is unlikely; but perhaps in this the New City Reader is not the last newspaper but the first newspaper, an early salvo in a new era of media in which we no longer take materiality—or for that matter, immateriality—for granted. And perhaps it is for this reason, that ultimately the work was not just a newspaper but a work of architecture.

- Kazys Varnelis

The new edition of the New City Reader has hit the streets of Istanbul with its first issue: Agenda. This issue’s editors are the founders of the paper, Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis; texts by Joseph Grima, Benan Kapucu, Ethel Baraona Pohl, Elian Stefa, Pelin Tan, and Kazys Varnelis.

The New City Reader is a newspaper on architecture, design, public space and the city. First published as part of The Last Newspaper, an exhibition held at the New Museum for Contemporary Art (New York City) in 2011, a new edition of the public newspaper will be published by the Istanbul Design Biennial team, to be hung on the streets of Istanbul in the months preceding the opening and during the run of the Istanbul Design Biennale. Each issue of the The New City Reader is guest-edited by a contributing network of architects, theorists, and research groups who will bring their particular expertise to bear on the individual sections.
 In emulation of a practice common in the nineteenth century and still popular in parts of the world today, the New City Reader is designed to be posted in public for collective reading.

Conceived by 
Joseph Grima (Domus) and Kazys Varnelis (Netlab), this newspaper’s content is derived from a series of discussions, debates, interviews and research into the spatial implications of epochal shifts in technology, economy, and society today.

Check the map to the right for locations or enter the article for a list of locations.

You can find the newspaper hung at the following locations:

Bilgi University
Eski Silahtarağa Elektrik Santrali, İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Santal İstanbul Kampüsü E-,1 Kazım Karabekir cad. no1 Eyüp / İstanbul

Yeditepe University
İnönü Mah. Kayışdağı Cad. 26 Ağustos Yerleşimi 34755 Ataşehir – İstanbul

Doğuş University
Doğuş Üniversitesi Sanat ve Tasarım Fakültesi Acıbadem, Kadıköy, 34722 İstanbul Dahili: 3110-3114

Aydın University
Bahçelievler Mh. Adnan Kahveci Bulvarı 78, Istanbul

Maltepe University
Marmara Eğitim Köyü Başıbüyük Mahallesi Maltepe/İstanbul 34854

Kadir Has University
Kadir Has Kampüsü (Cibali) Kadir Has Caddesi Cibali / İstanbul

Mimar Sinan University
Meclis-i Mebusan Caddesi No: 24 Fındıklı 34427 İstanbul

Işık University
Işık Üniversitesi Maslak Kampüsü, Büyükdere Cad. 34398 Maslak – Istanbul

Yıldız Technical University
Yıldız Teknik Üniversitesi, Mimarlık Fakültesi Barbaros Bulvarı 34349 Yıldız

İstanbul Technical University
Makina Fakültesi Gümüşsuyu Kampüsü 34437 Gümüşsuyu-İSTANBUL

Marmara University
Marmara Üniversitesi Güzel Sanatlar Fakültesi Küçük Çamlıca Acıbadem 34718 Kadıköy-İstanbul

Ara Cafe
Tosbağa Sok. 2 34433 Beyoğlu, Turkey

Urban Cafe
İstiklal Caddesi, Kartal Sokak, No: 6/A, Galatasaray, İstanbul.

DEPO
Address: DEPO / Tütün Deposu Lüleci Hendek Caddesi No.12 Tophane 34425 İstanbul

ODA Kule
Meşrutiyet Cad. No:63 Tepebaşı Beyoğlu / İstanbul

İKSV
Nejat Eczacıbaşı Binası Sadi Konuralp Caddesi No:5 Şişhane 34433 İstanbul

İstanbul Modern Lİbrary
Meclis-i Mebusan Cad., Liman İşletmeleri Sahası, Antrepo 4, 34433, Karaköy, 34433 İstanbul

Salt Galata
Bankalar Caddesi 11 Karaköy 34420 İstanbul

Salt Beyoğlu
İstiklal Caddesi 136 Beyoğlu 34430 İstanbul

Ethel Baraona Pohl. Architect, writer and blogger developing her professional [net]work linked to several architecture publications. As contributing editor for different blogs and magazines, she has written articles for Domus, Quaderns, and MAS Context among others. She has been invited to present her work in events like Postópolis! DF, and the international architecture festival Eme3. Co-founder of the independent publishing house dpr-barcelona with César Reyes Nájera, their projects, both digital and printed, subvert the boundaries of conventional publications, approaching to those which are probably the titles of architecture in the future.