Türkiye Pavillion, 16th Venice Architecture Biennale
Workshop Tutors: Erdem Tüzün, Eren Çıracı
Participants: Elif Kartal, Beril Önalan, Deniz Engin, Melodi Gülbaba, Merve Uzuner, Merve Akdoğan, Coşku Özdemirci, Oğul Can Öztunç, Cemil Çalkıcı, Kevin Mazanek
Curator: Kerem Piker
Associate Curators: Cansu Cürgen, Erdem Tüzün, Nizam Onur Sönmez, Yağız Söylev, Yelta Köm
Around the time of Inigo Jones’s travels in Italy, Evliya Çelebi was born in İstanbul as the son of an imperial goldsmith. On his twentieth birthday, prophet Muhammed appeared in a dream telling him that God wants him to be a world traveler and to write a book on his travels. He spent the rest of his life traveling and writing Seyahatname, a ten volume travelogue, a mixture of facts, accurate descriptions of places and stories crossing the border to fiction and fantasy.
If Jones was the analytical observer as a traveler, who studied Palladio and the architecture of ancient Rome, Evliya Çelebi was quite the opposite. In addition to places he visited as a part of diplomatic missions and military convoys, he wrote of places he had never seen, people he never met and things that possibly could not exist. Oscillating between fact and fiction, Seyahatname offers a view of the lands of the Ottoman Empire and beyond that is both informative and entertaining.
From Inigo Jones to Le Corbusier and countless other architects who traveled in different parts of the world for the purpose of seeing works of architecture, sketching and drawing has been an important part of their journeys. Drawing helps break down a building into its components, to understand the relation of parts to the whole as well as the relationship of the building to its context and viewer. Sketches and drawings are not only helpful for the person who make them, but also for others to see how someone else understands a particular work of architecture.
A drawing can try to capture many different aspects of a building including but not limited to the stylistic elements, various construction techniques used, spatial and formal arrangement of spaces and how people use the building. However it would be hard to claim that a building can be described fully as on object in relation to the rest of the world. A drawing only captures a part of its subject matter.
Given the limited capacity of a drawing to fully describe a building or any type of representation for that matter, what would be the potential of approaching the subject from the opposite direction, that of Evliye Çelebi, to freely re-imagine the history, program and formal organization of landmarks in Venice and create a visual travelogue?