The Making of Modern Turkish Architecture

This is the introductory essay of ARCAM’s (Architectuurcentrum Amsterdam) “Turkey Today: Contemporary Turkish Architecture in Turkey and the Netherlands” Exhibit, which took place in September-November 2004 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The author also consulted the curators.

Session organiser/chair: Architecture, Infrastructure and the Making of Modern Ireland

‘A free Ireland would drain the bogs, would harness the rivers, would plant the wastes, would nationalise the railways and the waterways, would improve agriculture, would protect fisheries, would foster industries, would promote commerce, and beautify the cities …’ (Padraig Pearse, ‘From a Hermitage’, 1913)

Somewhat unusually in his often romantic writings Padraig Pearse – poet, pedagogue and revolutionary – chose to describe the future of an independent Ireland in terms of infrastructure and technological processes. Terence Brown’s locating of this excerpt at the beginning his seminal work Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-2002 highlights the simultaneous and interlinking construction of both a new physical and cultural landscape for an independent modern nation. Lacking any significant industrial complex, the construction of new infrastructures in Ireland was seen throughout the 20th century as a key element in the building of the new State, just as the adoption of an international style modernism in architecture was perceived as a way to escape the colonial past. For Paul N. Edwards modernity and infrastructure are intimately connected.

‘infrastructures simultaneously shape and are shaped – in other words, co-construct – the condition of modernity. By linking macro, meso, and micro scales of time, space and social organisation, they form the stable foundation of modern social worlds’ (2003: 186).
Simultaneously omnipresent and invisible – infra means beneath – Edwards also points out that infrastructure tends only to become apparent when it is either new or broken. Interpreting the meso scale as being that of the building, this session calls for papers that critically and analytically investigate aspects of the architectures of infrastructure in 20th-century Ireland. Like the territory they explore these papers may range across scales to oscillate between a concern for the artefact and its physical landscape, and the larger, often hidden systems and networks that co-define this architecture.

Application-Specific Instruction Set Processor for SoC implementation of Modern Signal Processing Algorithms

A novel application-specific instruction set processor (ASIP) for use in the construction of modern signal processing systems is presented. This is a flexible device that can be used in the construction of array processor systems for the real-time implementation of functions such as singular-value decomposition (SVD) and QR decomposition (QRD), as well as other important matrix computations. It uses a coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC) module to perform arithmetic operations and several approaches are adopted to achieve high performance including pipelining of the micro-rotations, the use of parallel instructions and a dual-bus architecture. In addition, a novel method for scale factor correction is presented which only needs to be applied once at the end of the computation. This also reduces computation time and enhances performance. Methods are described which allow this processor to be used in reduced dimension (i.e., folded) array processor structures that allow tradeoffs between hardware and performance. The net result is a flexible matrix computational processing element (PE) whose functionality can be changed under program control for use in a wider range of scenarios than previous work. Details are presented of the results of a design study, which considers the application of this decomposition PE architecture in a combined SVD/QRD system and demonstrates that a combination of high performance and efficient silicon implementation are achievable. © 2005 IEEE.

Architecture and Construction Management at Queens University Belfast:Regional Cultural Centre

The Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny is a new 2000sqm arts center containing theatre, galleries, workshops and ancillary offices. The site is set back from the street, on high ground with good views. The form and envelope of the building was derived from geometrically connecting the site with the town’s two other main public buildings, the Cathedral (1901) and new Civic Offices (2002, also designed by MacGabhann Architects). This geometrical connection or vectors informed the geometry and shape of the building. This urban matrix of geometrically connecting three corner stones of society, namely the ecclesiastical headquarters, the administrative head quarters and the art centre helps to improve the town planning and urban design of the disparate and chaotic development that Letterkenny has become.
The large cantilever, which houses a 300sqm gallery, is aligned towards the Civic Offices, marks the entrance, and signifies a change of direction of the pedestrian route past the building, like a modern day obelisk.
The circulation routes and stairs internally provide views towards the civic offices and cathedral, thus reinforcing the connection between the three buildings and helps visitors make some sense of Letterkenny as an urban center. The main stairs and vertical circulation are contained behind the large glazed foyer, which is framed to be viewed externally like a proscenium stage, with visitors to the building passively acting their routes through the building.

ARCAM Sergisi:Modern Turkiyeyi Anlamak

This is an interview with the author about the "Turkey Today: Contemporary Turkish Architecture in Turkey and the Netherlands” Exhibition in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The author consulted the curators and wrote the introductory essay of the exhibition.

Infra-Éireann: Making Ireland Modern - Irish Pavilion for the 14th Architectural biennale, Venice 2014.

After an open competition, we were selected to commission, curate and design the Irish pavilion for the Venice biennale 2014. Our proposal engage with the role of infrastructure and architecture in the cultural development of the new Irish state 1914-2014. This curatorial programme was realised in a demountable, open matrix pavilion measuring 12 x 5 x 6 metres.

How modernity is absorbed into national cultures usually presupposes an attachment to previous conditions and a desire to reconcile the two. In an Irish context, due to the processes of de-colonisation and political independence, this relationship is more complicated.

In 1914, Ireland was largely agricultural and lacked any significant industrial complex. The construction of new infrastructures after independence in 1921 became central to the cultural imagining of the new nation. The adoption of modernist architecture was perceived as a way to escape the colonial past. As the desire to reconcile cultural and technological aims developed, these infrastructures became both the physical manifestation and concrete identity of the new nation with architecture an essential element in this construct.

Technology and infrastructure are inherently cosmopolitan. Beginning with the Shannon hydro-electric facility at Ardnacrusha (1929) involving the German firm of Siemens-Schuckert, Ireland became a point of various intersections between imported international expertise and local need. By the turn of the last century, it had become one of the most globalised countries in the world, site of the European headquarters of multinationals such as Google and Microsoft. Climatically and economically expedient to the storing and harvesting of data, Ireland has subsequently become an important repository of digital information farmed in large, single-storey sheds absorbed into dispersed suburbs. In 2013, it became the preferred site for Intel to design and develop its new microprocessor board, the Galileo, a building block for the internet of things.

The story of the decades in between, of shifts made manifest in architecture and infrastructure, from the policies of economic protectionism to the embracing of the EU is one of the influx of technologies and cultural references into a small country on the edges of Europe: Ireland as both a launch-pad and testing ground for a series of aspects of designed modernity.

Making Ireland Modern

Making Ireland Modern is a cross-disciplinary, inter-institutional, inter-media design and research project which emerged from an open competition (won by Boyd and McLaughlin) to commission/curate the Irish pavilion for the Venice biennale 2014. It explores the relationship between architecture, infrastructure and technology in the building of a new nation. Constructed as a demountable, open matrix of drawings, photographs, models and other artefacts, the exhibition (12 x 5 x 6 metres) presents ten infrastructural episodes – Negation, Electricity, Health, Transportation, Television, Aviation, Education, Telecommunications, Motorways, Data – spanning a period of one hundred years from 1916-2016. Exploring a range of scales from the detail design of objects to entire landscapes and other territories, Making Ireland Modern describes architecture’s role in transforming the physical and cultural identity of the new state through its intersession in the everyday lives of its population. In 2015, we were commissioned by the Arts Council of Ireland to expand and develop the pavilion for a three cities tour of Ireland as one of the five major strands of the Arts Council’s Art2016 programme of Irish State’s 1916-2016 centennial celebrations (2016).

Session organiser/chair: The architecture of coal and other energies

Coal ignited the industrial revolution. An organic sedimentary rock that energized the globe, transforming cities, landscapes and societies for generations, the importance of ‘King Coal’ to the development and consolidation of modernity has been well-recognised. And yet, as a critical factor in the production of modern architecture, coal—as well as other forms of energy—has been mostly overlooked.

From Appalachia to Lanarkshire, from the pits of northern France, Belgium and the Ruhr valley, to the monumental opencast excavations of Russia, China, Africa and Australia, mining operations have altered the immediate social and physical landscapes of coal-rich areas. But in contrast to its own underground conditions of production, the winning of coal, especially in the twentieth-century, has produced conspicuously enlightened and humane approaches to architecture and urbanism. In the twentieth century, educational buildings, holiday camps, hospitals, swimming pools, convalescent homes and housing prevailed alongside model collieries in mining settlements and areas connected to them. In 1930s Britain, pit head baths—funded by a levy on each ton produced—were often built in the International Style. Many won praise for architectural merit, appearing in Nicholas Pevsner’s guides to the buildings of England alongside cathedrals, village manors and Masonic halls as testimonies to the public good.

The deep relationships between coal and modernity, and the expressions of architecture it has articulated, in the collieries from which it was hewn, the landscape and towns it shaped, and the power stations and other infrastructure where it was used, offer innumerable opportunities to explore how coal produced architectures which embodied and expressed both social and technological conditions. While proposals on coal are preferred, we also welcome papers that interrogate the complexity, heterogeneity and hybridity of other forms of energy production and how these have also interceded into architectural form at a range of scales.