Architecture as Measure
Architecture as Measure
Neyran Turan
Actar Publishers, February 2020
Paperback | 6-1/4 x 9-1/4 inches | 300 pages | English | ISBN: 978-01948765299 | $39.95
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
In light of the current political crisis around climate change, what can architecture possibly contribute towards a new planetary imaginary of our contemporary environment beyond environmentalism and technological determinism? Instead of conceptualizing the idea of the environment as purely natural and in need of protection, as solely a problem that needs to be managed, or merely as the Earth, which limits the scope with a scalar bias, can we speculate on architecture as a measure both to assess and to act upon the world? Architecture as Measure is an elaboration on this question, and on the disciplinary and cultural potentials of such a provocation. It positions climate change as a cultural and political idea that requires a renewed architectural environmental imagination.
The book takes on this task by presenting a set of unconventional collisions between architecture and climate change, which all extrapolate broader concerns of the city, environment, and geography through the lens of specific architectural questions such as form, representation and materiality. In that way, the book is an invitation to boost architecture’s planetary effect by collapsing the centers and the peripheries of the discipline, by colliding its very outside with its very core interior. In addition to the introductory essay, the book consists of nine separate chapters, each of which contains an essay by Neyran Turan and is coupled by a project by her architectural practice NEMESTUDIO. Each essay, and thus the associated project in each chapter, positions certain problems brought by climate change, such as resource extraction, materiality, long time span, representation, geology, and waste etc. in architectural terms. Inherent in the premise of the book is the proposition of a new conception of architecture’s engagement with the wider world through a specific focus on architecture’s capacity to boost its planetary effect from within.
Neyran Turan is an architect and a partner at NEMESTUDIO, an architectural office that has been recognized with several awards ... She is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Architecture at the University of California-Berkeley.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
When writing about Neyran Turan's Architecture as Measure on World-Architects.com in April, I mentioned that, if not for the coronavirus, Turan's exhibition of the same name "would be opening next month in the Turkish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale" or "(fingers crossed) [in] August." People will have to wait a while longer, though, since the Biennale was postponed until May 2021, one full year after its original opening date. With more time to peruse the colorful book released earlier this year, I'm really looking forward to the exhibition, whenever it arrives (hopefully a second wave of coronavirus does not cancel the Biennale).
Architecture as Measure is structured in nine chapters, each with one essay by Turan and one or two projects by NEMESTUDIO, her Bay Area architectural practice. It starts with "After Nature," a short essay that argues for geohistory over more traditional distinctions between human history and natural history. It segues into the wonderful Museum of Lost Volumes, a fictional museum with colossal rooms — voids — that depict the toxic materials extracted from the earth to create wind turbines, solar panels, and other supposedly sustainable technologies. Here, as throughout the rest of the book, Turan uses words and images — beautiful, carefully crafted images — to upend conventional thinking about primarily environmental issues.
One of the most interesting formal aspects of Architecture as Measure is what I would call its computer-modeled maquette aesthetic. Many of the projects depict buildings and other elements as monochromatic 3D models composed like dioramas inside rooms and other well-lighted environments. With their pastels and bright colors, one would not mistake them for "real" spaces, but the insertion of ladders, sawhorses, and other tools of construction give the scenes clear in-progress conditions that are as intentional as the projects themselves. Such images make me wonder what an exhibition aligned with the book will be like. For sure, it won't be a straightforward presentation of Turan's projects. Instead, I'm guessing it will dismantle our expectations — the way her projects do the same.
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