INTERVIEW

“AboutBlank can be seen as a chimera which is in greek mythology a monstrous creature made of the parts of multiple animals”

ABOUTBLANK is one of the architecture and visual production office well-known in Istanbul. This initiative emerged during the early days of them university, when they were a large group of enthusiastic students. Forever, in 2006 the core of the company was formed by Hasan Gümüşsoy, Ozan Özdilek, Erhan Vural and Gökhan Kodalak, after natural selection through student competition projects. Arquitektus had a interest talk with them about their works.

1. How do you encourage to form this office of visual production and architecture?

AboutBlank is not a homogenious space, we all have different fields of interest, and we try to overlap them as much as possible, which takes us back into the concept of an interdiciplinary firm in the first place.

2. On this competitive and globalized world, what do you think about your tools to stay as market leaders in the visual production and architecture?

Internet is a great tool, on which we are communicating with you, and through you with many others right now. Our name, AboutBlank also refers to this, the internet explorer opening field; “about:blank”, from where you can reach for anything on a virtual level. And as a side note this shall be added, the border between the actual and the virtual seems already to be diminishing before our eyes. So afar from thinking about titles like “market leaders” or “star architects”, what we try to do simply is, voluntarily exploiting the tools of the global production.

3. Who are your customers for which you have worked?

We have a spectrum of metropolitan municipalities and commercial customers that we are used to, generally from national competitions.

4. How many projects have worked to the present? (approximatly).

It depends on the definiton of ‘work’, but we have completed approximately 20 architectural projects –most of them are competitions- and approximately 5 visual production projects -including short movies and installations.

5. What are the characterizes of your architecture in Istambul?

We don’t have “a” character, we have multitudes of characters, as this can also be said about Istanbul. So the urban condition we are living and working in, may have effected us in this way, erasing the search for one and only fixed sublime character out of our minds, and opening room to many different becomings.

6. In your country, how do you assume the urban space?

Turkey is a young country on the topic of modern urban design, and has many childhood traumas. The early years of the Republic (1920’s to 1950’s) has seen modernist approaches which celebrate pastoral thoughts ―mutant remnants of Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities― in the capital Ankara, as a rolemodel for all the Anatolian side. Istanbul however, with all its cosmopolitan faces was left aside like an ill child and tried to be regulated with interventionalist vaccines through its historical texture.

Well, to cut it short, let’s say, the ill child fortunately never recovered from its cosmopolitan disease, which gives us the 13 million populated multicultural urban space to live with. It can be said, that the architects and urban designers, and of course the powers that they are attached to knowingly or unknowingly, still try to regulate Istanbul, and identify it with a true and never-changing essence. The urban space is thus, assumed as a wild area that needs to be tamed. We, on the contrary, as AboutBlank, assume its wildness as a gift, and try to find ways to make it wilder. We are the voluntary exploiters of Istanbul’s wilderness and complexity.

7. What kind of novelty materials are beginning to use?

Afar from the use of materials, we are more interested in the use of construction techniques. The global agenda and its components are used more on Turkey’s metropolitan spaces, yet the latest computational advantages, the “Gehry” ―like techniques are still far from being common to use.

8. The next ten years in the world, what is your opinion about the concepts that is going to use in the construction of buildings, shopping centers and departments?

The next ten years is a long margin. The last ten to twenty years is easier to talk on, Koolhaas’s “Generic City” offers good hints about this; “The Generic City is the city liberated from the captivity of center, from the straitjacket of identity. The Generic City breaks with this destructive cycle of dependency: it is nothing but a reflection of present need and present ability. It is the city without history. It is big enough for everybody. It is easy. It does not need maintenance. If it gets too small it just expands. If it gets old it just self-destructs and renews. It is equally exciting ―or unexciting― everywhere. It is “superficial” ―like a Hollywood studio lot, it can produce a new identity every Monday morning.”

If we change the “city without history” part, with the “city that generates its own history”, and don’t take the self-destruction part literally, we can have a short summary to start discussing from.

9. Do you consider the tastes of people (your customers) also have changed over the years? What about these? What do your customers prefer?

Tastes change over the years, from person to person, from area to another area, and although we have a short history behind us, our tastes also did change and are still changing. Change is again a better concept to talk about, instead of customer preference, for it also changes according to the customer, which brings us back to the “change” again. "Everything changes and nothing remains still" from the ancient Greece makes sense, as change is one of the main concepts and research points for us along with, multitude, complexity, hybridizations, flows, urban junctions and urban disjunctions.

10. What is the project have you generated the most satisfaction?

Hard to tell. Adana urban design project was more of a threshold than others, so we may single out that, if we have to.

11. Which one was your more difficult project?

Adana again, because we were working in an architectural studio ―not our own studio― by that time, and the time and the effort we put into that was divided through day and night. The hardest giving the most satisfaction then, classic.

12. Which one project would you get again to change or improve?

Any of them can be changed ―by ourselves or freely by others―, none of our projects was formed through a deterministic approach with a non-changeable final position, with a fixed end in our minds. Our process itself is more important than the result, we are more interested in becomings, than beings.

13. What project do you coming now? What about this?

Right now we are in the AboutBlank Interregnum period, we are scattered around for social and personal issues and working on different projects for different purposes. We are trying to schedule our time and effort into new projects, and regather, as soon as it becomes a possibility.

14. How do the research programs and exhibition designs contribute to your job? In general, what advantage provide video installations and the interactive motion media?

Research programs and exhibition designs, and short movies, and every work of theory, media and design is indeed our job, which is to create concepts and ideas. So there is a feedback from one to the other, this enriches our approaches, it creates a multitude of ideas in its simplest term, and we try to realize that idea in which medium we prefer it to be on.

15. You say: "Mobility is the ultimate advantage for the working environments of today's world”. How should understand citizens this phrase?

Mobility is what we prefer against stability. As we prefer becoming than being, multitude than the one and only, the hybrid than the pure, the urban than the pastoral, the complex than the compact. They are all related with each other, and can be found tangled up in today’s global network easily, which we try to use to our advantage.

16. Have you thought about open other branches in the world? Where and how fast?

This is more about office policies, and supply & demand relations, but afar from that, through the help of internet we hope to have a future with not even having a branch of any kind, we want to be branchless in this sense, which means, the branch is the global network itself, wherever you attach yourself to.

17. How would you define the kind of work to do?

Neither we define the works, nor the works define us, it is in this third space that they become “our” work, with no slave/master dialectic, it is a struggle, definitions and refinations in this third realm, are useless. This is the realm of overlapping.

18. What phrase characterize your job or who is the most important figure that your architecture is identified?

We talked a lot about multitude of characterizations and the loss of identity as a more important figure already. Metaphors are useless, but to put in a picture to be better understood if so needed, AboutBlank and its production ―not separating one from the other― can be seen as a chimera which is in greek mythology a monstrous creature made of the parts of multiple animals.

19. What are your success keys?

Everything would be easier, if there were any keys to success, wouldn’t it?

20. In the competitiveness world, what would you recommend to youth which are encouraging to study architecture?

They shall be encouraged to find their own ways and own becomings, which is more than enough.

Interwiew: Kattia Maud Castillo

Image: http://www.mimdap.org/w/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/beyoglu-1.jpg