Architecture and Car : ENGIN TULAY Car Designer & Architect & Lecturer

ACADEMIC

MASTER THESIS IN ARCHITECTURE

ARCHITECTURE AND THE CAR

PLACE WITH CONTINUOUSLY CHANGING BOUNDARIES

SUMMARY

Architecture, as a witness to the existential relation between man and space, always updates its structural and conceptual integrity in accordance with changes in human life. This study aims to provide a new commentary on man’s journey among different spatial dimensions through a car that is positioned as a vital cross-section in architecture and city platforms. The thesis consists of three main sections, in which semantic content broadens out through spatial perception with the intention of examining the reality formed by man and machine.

In the first section, changing concepts and balances in human life across the modern process are asserted. In the second section, connections among architecture, cars, and cities that shelter all vital aspects of man and urban space are discussed. This section intends to scrutinize the ironic structure of the new spatial concept that is shaped by the connection between man and car so as to exist through the man's perceptive integrity and change between urban scale and architectural scale. In the third section, the scale of space integrity existing in accordance with the vital unity between man and car is examined with the intention of bringing up the reality that the car is a fundamental determinant of urbanism. This section aims to introduce the limits of the new thresholds formed in man’s spatial perception by a car that resembles an architectural space with its physical and psychological dimensions formed by several human sensations.

PREFACE

The study aims at an intellectual and practical experience of theoretical and abstract expansions within a multi-disciplinary approach and collective consciousness. In addition, scaled sketching and modeling practices that embrace annotations from intellectual processes in collage, or diagram, characteristics are valuable for the process; these derivative studies, as an anthology and sampling, focus on a prudential assessment of abstract dimensions of spaces as per modern architecture via man, space, car, motion, and affiliations of vital contextures that form a mobility perspective in urbanism. These allow us to collaborate about the prospective city framework and its dynamics to project the phenomenon that shapes the significance of cars, which grows within this context. In this sense, throughout the study, cars are assessed as social consciousness and memory and examined as a social program that steers cross-cultural communications and postures.

The study addresses the effects of the connection between roads and cars in the frame of a city that resembles a living organism with its several key definers. The continuity of roads within the integral spatial formation of the city and the sensation of speed as a result of this via cars form the subtitles of this study. The man manifests himself in this ongoing journey and proposes to broaden the limits of space in accordance with the relationship that the car builds with the city; therefore, it aims to provide a new perspective on the connotations of contemporary architectural paradigms. The connection between man and machine forms and acquires spatial characteristics, and this evolution materializes through the fraternization of numerous perceptions and consequently forms idiosyncratic structures in the modern city context that assign various meanings to cars as objects. In our time, while cars exist in a spatial integrity with their physical dimensions, they are led to be integrated with their psychological dimensions through several sensations.

University: Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Architecture
Institute: Faculty of Architecture/Institute of Science and Technology
Science Program: Architecture
Program: Architectural Design
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ferhan Yürekli
Degree Awarded and Date: Master of Science

CONTENT (SUMMARY)

ABSTRACT

Car: Another Space and Another Time for Humans

With their symbolic and aesthetic attributes that generate different explorations of the existential appeals of space and time, cars are one of the most significant symbols of the modern era. While generating a new reinterpretation of modern living configuration, cars also change the borders of the physical and psychological dimensions of the space and transfer their perception towards a new, unprecedented dimension. By means of cars taking place in our daily lives, the space we live in is now defined (scaled and calculated) by the time, not by the physical distance between two locations. Cars, in accordance with their competence of movement at different spatial planes, add new dimensions to human lives and form new cognitive structures related to those planes; thus, cars are one of the most significant thresholds of this interpretation through the modern process.

This extraordinary bond between modern man and car has reformed the sense of modern city; beside, the new dimensions added to the sense of space by car sustained a dangerous but irresistible trip for modern man. This century-long relationship between man and the car, which reveals complicated moods and quests, can actually be considered one of the most substantial thresholds of the explanation and interpretation of modern architecture in a spatial manner. Car builds a panorama of concepts equivalent to abstract implications harbored by almost a "wall," and during that process, car includes its own physical existence, both irruptive and directly.

The underlying cause of the first car manufacturing adventure was beyond making a vehicle that operates on its own; however, it was rather serving more individual purposes to completely change the idea of man to commute (faster) and be on the road. Within the extent of cars' current significance and values, perhaps the concept of individualism is the most essential phenomenon that has not changed since those days. The idea of traveling with cars brought along the need to reinterpret various spatial dimensions that evolve beyond motors and their power for man in the name of the depth of travelers’ relationships within the surrounded space.

While cars clutter cities and city lives, on the other hand, they have started to create their own dynamic aesthetic and panorama of imagery connotations. The course of senses within the road concept, such as leaving, escaping, withdrawing, translocation, placelessness, and nonlocality, has strengthened through the presence of cars and the sense of physical and mental freedom provided by them, and this has become more addictive for man. In a car, the surroundings move; thus, cars have the ability to add new dimensions to concepts of space related to movement; they are attributed to the space where speed and freedom are felt deeply. More on this, this whole spatial experience arouses a feeling as a side and catalyst, either an additional equalizer space that contains a unique architectural structure that can be defined by its own particular physical and psychological dimensions for man.

The underlying truth of the first car contained individual reasons referring to changing human life rather than serving public transportation; besides, in this sense, the idea of expedited life is a result of modernism’s attempts to adapt man to the fictive structure of this new life that imposes everything is sequential within instantaneous changes. During the early modernism stages, the increasing expedition of life became irrepressible; moreover, people spent the process of adapting to this new life largely in their cars, which can also be defined as a new kind of social structure and interface. Cars are an indicator of modern technology and mechanization on the one hand, and on the other hand, a significant symbol of the mechanic awareness and operations that people had to develop in order to survive within their dramatically transformed living and social structure during the modern process.

Today, the car is in a different position than the early prototypes in every sense; beyond only featuring mechanical functionality to move from one place to another, it contains a vital structure that is sculpted from various emotional statements and spatial perceptions of man. Currently, we are in a paradoxical structure position that furnishes references to speed, vision, emotion, sensation, memory, social cognitive maps, cultural codes, explorations, communication, aesthetics, shape and form, art, and architectural hypothesis in line with the deep and layered relationship that humans build with space. This present connotation of a car evolved it into a position of a social structure and “an entity” that is integrated into that structure on one hand, and on the other, it developed them among a social network and embodied into an important paradigm of architectural evolution in the modern age that can be defined as the tangible occurrence of all physical and abstract patterns in which human lives subsist.

The diversity of the spatial plane between the car and movement intensifies the power of social communication within the car and expands the cultural dimensions of this communication. A car, as a moving object, has qualifications beyond covering the human body like makeup and clothes; paradoxically, it provides people the opportunity to articulate and expose their own existence in unnamed yet familiar social interactions. Together with its established moving capability, the global image of a car ensures its existence without losing its holism in different cultures; likewise, cars, by having the capability of movement among diverse spatial planes, remove the borders of identity between different places and cultures as a communication tool.

Today, cars are significant normative structures that are meticulously designed in order to create a specific connotation for various social and individual formations. Corresponding with their physical and mechanical necessities, all the abstract spatial, sensorial, paradoxical, imaginative, and cognizance evaluations concerning the formal interpretations of movement, acceleration, speed, and translocation establish the fundamental determinants of the car designs in an aesthetic sense.

Roads went through changes according to cars in the sense of both their existence and conceptual assessment. The concept of a road, which could be defined as a path of some various static components related to physical distance to reach the cities before the existence of cars, has transformed cities into a more dynamic structural integrity in association with cars. Together with modern life, the existence of cars addressed the parameters of city planning and provoked the rise of new urban concepts regarding the necessity of adaptation to the new vital changes formed by the relationship with cars. More to this, the most fundamental modification regarding urban space and planning formed by these new impacts is that they recast the alignment of all spatial dimensions between the road and its surrounding environment. The transformation of roads regarding the diversified relation between man and machine led people, who first developed the urban space and then tried to form the roads according to the structural installation of cities before the era of cars, to reassess the concept of journey and embrace an approach that implies distributing to the fullest extent of the old cities. Today, the perception of modern cities forms a dynamic semantic structural content that enlivens spaces surrounded by roads and encloses continuity in the sense that cars can now permeate every corner of cities.

The process of explanation and formalization of space with its physical and psychological dimensions starts with defining the most vital aspect by which the space authenticates itself: its existence. In this regard, cars are one of the most fundamental scales to shape the individual characteristics of urban space and also evaluate people within the social scope in accordance with man-to-machine interactions. In this sense, knowing that urban space is defined by a division of several spaces as per the needs of human life, it highlights the significance of cars among the relationships between cities and people throughout such a complex, multilayered infrastructure. From this standpoint, the cross-section between urban space and man has been skidded into a new dimension in which cars also join this spatial unity. Therefore, the course of connotations forming this dimension is a multilayered assessment that expands the boundaries of urban space towards undefined limits shaped by the laws of motion.

On one hand, cars triggered the development of motorized modernism within the modern progression; on the other, they display the notion that suggests the certain necessity of mobilization in human life, more concretely in urban space. In this sense, the concepts of drifting away from the ground by moving brought various new prospects regarding placelessness in terms of architecture, together with the existence of cars within modern progress. While ever-changing opinions on speed and distance have led to individuals being perceived as constant travelers, urban plans are restructured accordingly as well; the highways replaced streets, and the roads attained a layered semantic integrity in a fictitious range of change, existence, infinity, and freedom.

The idea of existence is getting the most diversified perception of man in conjunction with the concept of space, which has now become more difficult than ever to define its borders and dimensions. This intimate relation between man and machine throughout the modern era has brought new efforts for spatial pursuits and interpretations of life to exist; thus, the car has formed the most significant paradigm over its existence for the sake of this relation through physical and psychological dimensions of space. The car has added a mobile yet paradoxical constitution to the spatial integration and provided a transition between different places to create a completely new urban setup and life on various scales.

This existential relation between man and speed, which occurs upon instantaneous changes in daily lives, has formed new connotations in urban space in the context of the car through the change of the road concept. The mechanical need between car and speed has added acceleration to gain momentum as a burden to the relationship between city and road to indicate the ongoing change in human life. The car, with its inclination towards speed, generates a unique experience and extended awareness per sense that cannot be felt in any other spatial plane. Herein, this course should be formed through parameters and references to urban space that moves with instantaneous environmental changes and the complex interior pattern of the car; at the same time, the driver has to restructure and reinterpret all that process according to his or her personal experiences concerning spatial precision.

One who travels in a speeding car would have to redefine the surfaces between inside and outside; speed exposes new sensations for the man that would cause him or her to reinterpret the surrounding environment in a spatial manner. Thus, the surface that a car forms between inside and outside as an interface creates a psychological statement about being an introvert or an extrovert due to personal tendencies. Lyric poet Giacomo Leopardi, the inspirational icon of modern Italian poetry, portrays the speed of a car in his diary as: "Indeed, this speed nearly arouses a feeling of eternity; it aggrandizes and intensifies the soul." Moreover, the speed that enriches the context of a car embraces the feeling of eternity in space for the man. The most significant spatial aspect of the car is that transferring fundamental structures of architectural space takes form through dynamic interactions created by all other encircled spaces; thus, his space embraces a significant living structure for man as a witness to life.

While yoga-like exhaustions as a result of long drives in cars are considered a spiritual trip as well as personal relief, at the same time, the road transforms itself into a kind of barrier between silence and chaos in mental terms. The speed of transportation increases each day, and new relations that are shaped by non-human senses are born between man and machine due to the necessity of keeping up with this speed in modern life. The act of combining a car as an object with driving as an action transforms the city concept into a process of excessive interpretation for humans. In this modern process, in which we attempt to make sense of everything around us, cars embrace several spatial declinations that are found in the act of driving. In this sense, a road turns into a wall, and man does not know what is behind, which removes the physical borders of space that are comprehended as well as interpreted by man through several emotional sensations.

When man reinterprets time and space scope inside a car, in fact, it represents the first image of existence that comes to mind: to live. The journey of life that people experience in its simplest form becomes difficult to shape as well as easy with cars. The quote “Home is a machine to live in," which is cited frequently during the modern era, is an early prognosis for modern man on mechanic consciousness and embodies a metaphor for the necessity of modern life to function as flawlessly and as fast as a machine. Considering home as an architectural unit, it forms the most fundamental spatial unit; at the same time, it is the only place for man to leave his or her social identity and be authentic. In this sense, it is not a coincidence that home is the most convenient place chosen by the industrial revolution and the machine age in order to reinterpret the new social order for modern man. The aim of resembling home to a machine is to draw man closer to this new social order to integrate personal space with social space; the most striking phase of this integration would be actualized by cars, which are the most significant indicator of mechanization. As a place, a car represents a transition and an integration throughout the space hierarchy among various scales and dimensions. In this sense, cars have a common perception of space and can be referred to as the spatial unity of life; this human body-wide gap is an integrative and unifying venue for people. The physical and psychological parameters of the intermediate space of the car, which is formatted by these integrative dynamics, connect the home corridor to the outside lane for the man. Home, the most basic architectural unit, is the starting point to observe complex spatial connections at different levels in everyday life; cars, in this sense, mean to people an independent and autonomous extension of home in the context of the continued integrity they add to the sense of space.

The approach between personal space and social space gives rise to a need for integration for people who are forced to cope with the responsibilities of being an individual in society. In this sense, the physical space of a car defines a surface between inside and outside while holding a life for humans. The freedom and hele provided by cars in the context of transition between social and personal spaces transform themselves into new integrated structures that are formed by the socially hybrid characteristics of cars for men. In unison, the interior of a car hosts a life—a technological uterus that forms us as much as it deforms us.

While a car is defining a surface between inside and outside, it also creates a gap that indicates a spatial integrity upon vital requirements; beyond being just an object formatted by movement with its plate and glass surfaces, a car is one of the fundamental parts of an urban panorama within architectural space patterns and the surrounding environment. Car, which completely changed the idea of city and reformatted urban space, leads us to reconsider the relations between urban space and architectural space. We are fully aware of the fact that cars are not the presence of fixed elements of imagination inside the city; however, they reoccur in the spatial configuration of movements in urban life. Therefore, cars, both with their physical presence and abstract spatial content, are one of the key determinants of modern cities within integrated and paradoxical life structures.