2024 - 2025 Spring
Landscape Design I Poster
"Beyond The Garden: Articulating The Nature Within Urban Life"

Landscape Design I (PEM 212E - CRN 20812) - "Beyond The Garden: Articulating The Nature Within Urban Life" will be conducted by Assoc. Prof. Melih Bozkurt (PhD) @mel_bozkurt and Res. Assist. Arzu Türk @_arzuturk_ in the 2024-2025 Spring Semester.

The studio aims to question the phenomenon of the garden and discuss what kind of meanings and functions today’s garden can have. The garden, which has started its journey with agriculture and existed for thousands of years, was used by different cultures for the same purposes which leads to some common typologies all around the world: palace gardens, pleasure gardens, orchards, cemetery/monument gardens, temple/religious shrine gardens… Istanbul, as a city that has hosted many cultures and held the urban life intertwined with nature for centuries due to its topography, is gradually losing its gardens, which have an important place in the old urban texture, by the dense urbanization processes in the last decades it has undergone.

In the studio, which pursues what kind of a garden can meet the needs of today’s urban life, the general garden concept will be studied with the deconstruction technique and some questions will be directed during the study in accordance with the readings to analyse the garden concept thoroughly. After the cognitive phase, the studio will focus on Kuzguncuk, one of the old neighborhoods of Istanbul, and a new garden concept and design will be developed according to the problems and potentials in the area.