Reconfiguring Istanbul’s Ataturk Kopru across the Golden Horn

GSD Option Studio; Critic: Hashim Sarkis

The focus of the studio was to determine the architectural potential of an infrastructural element – a bridge in Istanbul - by reconsidering the status of infrastructure. Do we conceptualize infrastructure as a system or as an object? The site is at the foot of the Ataturk Bridge and the public navy dockyards. This land permits a series of improvements around the existing bridge including enhancing the public space at the landing of the bridge and linking the nearby neighborhood of Kasimpasa to the waterfront.

I proposed a viaduct extension of the bridge to remedy the disjuncture of the site (neighborhood to coast, neighborhood to neighbor-hood) and create a heightened experience of threshold through the logic of both bridge and viaduct. To graft onto the bridge is to continue its gesture: to join separate entities. The viaduct becomes a semi-visible, constitutive object that, like a seam, pulls its surroundings together by providing an ordering logic. This viaduct creates order by a connection to something larger than itself, physically, visually, and programmatically.