Year: 2012
Location: Istanbul
Type: Large-scale/Territorial Design
Project Team: Neyran Turan, Mete Sonmez, Kate Morgan, Alex Stitt, Renee Reder, Chimaobi Izegou.
The TYPO project proposes a network of Campus Commons, a new type of spatial organization and institutional framework for the university campuses in Istanbul. Positioned along the existing and future lines of major rail transit stops (subways, light rails, suburban trains), Campus Commons is a new type of collective institution that contains spaces for the university programs as well as other public amenities. While proposing a renewed dialogue between large scale interventions and territorial networks through typological investigation, TYPO proposes specific architectural interactions between scale and form through various experiments on territorial legibility.
The larger ambition of the project is to introduce a new role for architecture at the scale of territory. For that, three types of territorial interventions and their further typological variations are established for particular sites in Istanbul. While the unity among various interventions is achieved via the reduction within the formal language of the project, each intervention’s typological repetition is based on its contextual specificity. Thus, the term TYPO has the double connotation of type as series that share a common language and typo as unexpected error or divergence from norm.