Category

Region

SUNPATHING

SUNPATHING

Category
Daylight investigations - Region 2: Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Students
Adnan Mert Gürel
Ödül Okur

Teacher
Burçin Başyazıcı

School
Yeditepe University

Country
Turkey

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Before this idea came up, we studied and observed people’s orientation to daylight-sunset along with their moods for a long time. Along with this, we saw that watching the sunset represents a moment when people get away from the intensity of life they have created for themselves, symbolize for a moment. Humans, including mainly us, have always been drowned in the intensity of life. We tried to get rid of this drowning by raising our heads and looking away for a second or two. Most of the time, we waited for the sun to set, our eyes searched for the color tones there. We always set up the phrase “How beautiful”. When that moment comes, we pause, watch and actually feel the purification. It was the way to break away from the chaos, even for a moment. We tried to create all our works under this philosophy.

We wanted to specialize this moment and present it to people in a frame like a picture, and we asked ourselves how we should transform this sunset, which is everywhere in life, into abstractions of the sun’s rays and add it to people with an architectural language. When we think about this in the most minimal way, we have abstracted the sun’s rays as the shadows of long thin columns of different lengths. We were able to position these columns at the end of the path followed by normal human life according to the position where the sun sets, and we were able to situate that “frame the sun” logic that we wanted, together with an architectural language.

We had created the end we wanted, and we thought it was effective. Here we posed a second question to ourselves. What if we made a road and saw the reflections of the sun on this road and took shape accordingly. Could we reach the end together this way? We wanted to work simple and effective here and looked for ways to incorporate existing structures (business, park, workshop etc.). We’ve added some columns that can guide certain places with its shadow that can point to the position of the sun. In this way, people were able to come closer to understanding where they would be at what time. At the very beginning of the path, we added the abstractions of the opposite idea of the columns in an order that we will encounter at the end. We defined this contrast as randomly thrown columns in an existing square. The end of the road now defines the order and the beginning of the chaos.

After finding the answers to these questions, we started to work on the question of how we can make this path more defined. We found it appropriate to design a booklet in order to make our posts showing certain places at certain times on the road more understandable. In this booklet, we have prepared a program that explains where and what is done and where those columns show. In this way, we have now been able to fully include people in our program and architectural language.

Only one question remained. People could not follow this path every day, and some did not want to follow this path. Here we have discussed how we can balance this correctly. We wanted to turn it into a ritual that takes place once a year according to the special times of the sun. We wanted to achieve a path that is activated once a year, and a “end” that is always protected. Here we are back to when this idea first appeared. The most important part was always the end. That’s why we thought it would be right to always protect the final structure and have it always exist in people’s lives. While thinking about these, we realized that we could adapt the last structure to all parts of the world, and we carried this last moment wherever we could. There was now a “trace” we left in different parts of the world, which was ritualized at different times.

We framed the sun everywhere, and we were able to offer people the opportunity to experience this experimentation by making a soft touch to their lives.