2018 National Architecture Award

“This conceptual project frees itself entirely from the architectural act's burden of ‘building’ and making, and draws attention to a global, shared issue that transcends cultures. It prompts us to consider how strangers can live together in a city without experiencing this as an obligation. Through an effective graphic language, it expresses subjects that should now feature more frequently on our architectural agenda, such as the typology of the stranger and the blurring of near and far, urban and rural, and geographical boundaries. Finally, through storytelling that allows us to imagine our everyday lives in such a city, it depicts the world described in its conceptual text as a comic-book narrative. Interpreting this idea as a work that follows familiar precedents, such as an update of Archigram's visions of the 1960s or Callenbach's Ecotopia of the 1970s…”

Zenotopia means a world where different people with no connection to one another live together. It is derived from the Greek word ξένος (xenos, stranger). The study highlights the fading of the category of the stranger in social life. It first emphasizes the disappearance of the stranger as a type, alongside the blurring of urban and rural geographical boundaries through globalization and the increase in both the quantity and quality of human interaction worldwide. While examining the circumstances of people who are constrained by physical spatial boundaries between city and countryside and kept physically distant in urban life, it traces the origins of the tendency to live in gated communities enclosed by walls, private security and cameras, symbolizing an escape from strangers in cities. The project gives way to dissident flows that flare up and fade away; form and dissolve at every moment; resist definition; are placeless and rootless, fragmented, autonomous, intermittent, unstable, without beginning or end, capable of evaporating, nonlinear and heterogeneous; take on different forms at every moment; move at different speeds; escape established channels; are unplanned, unscripted, irregular and decentralized; penetrate rigid structures to dissolve and transform them; and are difficult to trace.

The award ceremony and exhibition opening for the 2018 / XVI National Architecture Exhibition and Awards programme took place on 6 April 2018 at the CerModern Modern Arts Centre in Ankara, attracting considerable interest and attendance. The winning works were announced during the ceremony and the awards presented to their recipients. The exhibition, featuring all the works submitted for jury assessment, will be open to visitors at CerModern until 13 April 2018. It will continue to be shown in Türkiye and abroad according to the established programme.

One of our founding architects, Ömer Yeşildal, Architect, M.Arch., received an award

IN THE CONCEPT PRESENTATION CATEGORY FOR HIS PROJECT ‘Zenotopia’.