Learning about mass timber and broadly what timber is capable of in the construction industry, the realization one arrives at is a simple fact that the only real challenge is to convince society. Convincing and persuading people that things have to change, that this change needs to come immediately, and how this change can be executed are fundamental parts of this challenge. For the following project, I focused on this global problem on a scale of a country.
Therefore I started to gather data about how much concrete is produced annually in Turkey, what this concrete is used for, what percentage of the buildings are made of concrete, how many buildings are planned on being built in the near future etc. Inspired by the work Scale of Carbon the next step was to try to visualize the consequences of this construction method, in a way to materialize the effects of the choices we make.
Although not executed, the initial intention was to make these visualizations into billboards to get the most attention and attraction possible in a city of nearly 20 million. Instead, these images were placed on billboards on photoshop, therefore being referred to as a Virtual Protest.
My previous coursework for Narratives 1 and 2 was based on the densification of cities and using timber extensions in Istanbul. Some ideas and visuals of this project were also used in the images placed on the billboards.
An iconic structure such as the Galata Tower was selected due to its significance in the city’s history, as a scale used to indicate the massiveness of the figures that are mentioned.
Following the first step of materialization the amount of waste that is created, the next phase is hinting the potential Turkey has, to build with timber and its advantages over other building materials. And lastly suggests building timber extensions in the city, due to the economic, and ecological reasons, and conveniences it provides in dense urban landscapes.
Virtual Protest is a project of IaaC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed at MMTD, Master in Mass Timber Design in 2021/2022 by Student: Esin Zeynep Aydemir. Faculty: Daniel Ibanez. Course: Narrative 3