no|w|here

After becoming a little more familiar with building a community, we went to Sille district in Konya to see the terrain. On the coldest day of April, we were at the dam, taking notes and trying to remember everything around us, trying to find what we considered important. Later, to warm up a bit, we went to the village of Sille and immediately climbed into the caves formed by natural causes. Afterwards, we saw the church in the village, the primary school which was entirely made of wood, and the main roads around the village. I have discussed this field trip in more detail in another article; if you are interested, you can access it here.

After seeing and analyzing all this environment, our teachers taught us that determining the main strategy for the organization we would create and proceeding around it would make it easier to establish the organization. For my main strategy, I developed it with the idea that in the dam area, we could experience our relationship with nature differently at different levels, and that I could use the sloping terrain as an advantage. Since I could control the water by changing the shape of the land, and this would affect our relationship with and perception of the water at different levels, I developed my strategy around this. Ultimately, my strategy emerged as Cleave through the Water.

Of course, since the word "cleave" itself has a direction, I envisioned an organization that cleaves from land to water, and I decided that this organization needed to be divided into three parts due to the difference in topographic slope. As the organization took shape around these three main parts, the shoreline was shaped accordingly, creating different water levels. I arranged the cavities and the splitting of the water along the shore according to how we experience the water and the land. I created nested volumes.

This design process, filtered through the strong winds and natural caves of Sille, transformed into an organization that shaped the topography by cutting through it with water. The interwoven volumes I conceived with the "Cleave through the Water" strategy, dividing from land to water into three main parts, did not remain merely a design experiment. It was a great source of pride for me that this project was deemed worthy of exhibition within the Mimed (Association for Supporting Architectural Education) Competition, held at Istanbul Technical University (ITU), one of the most prestigious platforms for architectural education. The exhibition, where my project met with professionals and students, is the best proof of how powerfully my dreams resonated in the sloping terrain of Sille.