Mekan kuran hikayeler
Space generating stories
Yazar: AYŞE HİLAL MENLİOĞLU
Danışman: DOÇ. DR. SIDIKA ASLIHAN ŞENEL
İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi / Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü / Mimarlık Ana Bilim Dalı / Mimari Tasarım Bilim Dalı
Derece: Yüksek Lisans, 2017
Konu: Mimarlık = Architecture

Özet:
Bu tez çalışması okuma deneyimi ile mekan deneyiminin birbirine benziyor olduğu fikrinden yola çıkmaktadır. Okumanın nasıl bir mekansallık ürettiğini sormaktadır. Buna bağlı olarak hikayelerin mekansal karakterlerini ne gibi yöntemler aracılığıyla kurabildiklerini merak etmektedir.
Araştırma, hikayelerin betimleyici özellikleri ile ilgilenmemektedir. Daha çok anlatım biçimleri sayesinde kazandıkları ilişki kurma şekillerini incelemektedir. Hikayeye ait özelliklerin yanında, yazarın ve okurun üretebildiği mekansal pratikler ve taktikler de tartışılmaktadır. Bu tez anlatı mimarlığından (narrative architecture) farklı olarak, "hikaye gibi" mekan üretme yöntemleri aramamakta, hikayelerin nasıl mekansal üretimde bulunabildiğini araştırmaktadır.
Metin, yazar ve okur arasındaki ilişki ise yapısalcı ve art yapısalcı kuramdan yardım ile açılabilmektedir. Tezin ikinci bölümü okurun nasıl olup da metindeki anlamı üretmekte yazardan daha etkin bir rol oynayabildiği üzerinedir. Burada anlamın, yazar-metin-okur arasındaki hareketinin önemi ortaya çıkar. İlişkili olarak; mesafeler, yer değiştirme ve hareket kavramları ile hikaye anlatıcılığı arasındaki bağ açığa çıkar.
Anlatıbilim kuramında hikayelerin olay, aktör, zaman ve yer olmak üzere farklı dört malzemeden imal edildiği söylenmiştir. Mieke Bal'ın kuramsallaştırdığı bu yaklaşımın, mimarlık pratiklerine ve mekan üretimine uyarlanabilir olduğu dikkat çekicidir. Bu malzemelerin mimarlık ve ilişkili disiplinlerde ne gibi ögeler ve kavramlar ile karşılandığı, mekan üretiminin sahip olduğu imkanları ve buradan açılabilecek perspektifleri gösterebilir. Hikayeyi imal eden malzeme ile mekanı imal edenler arasındaki ortaklaşmalar ile farklılaşmaların bu disiplinlerin birbiriyle ilişkilendiği farklı düzlemlere denk geldiği söylenebilir.
Kuramsal çalışmalar disiplinler arası bağlamı kurarken, hikaye okuma denemeleri içeren "Hikayeleri Haritalamak" bölümünde bu bağlamda araştırmalar içeri. Sekiz farklı hikaye diyagramı metinlerin zaman, yer, aktör ve olay bilgisi taşıyan ögelerinin birbirinin işini yapabildiğini açığa çıkarır. Bu şekilde okunmaya başlanan mekan bilgisi, metnin önerdiği hareketin şekline ve karakteri aracılığıyla açığa çıkmaktadır. Hikayede var olan mekansallığın yeniden üretilmesi hem notasyon-diyagram araştırmaları ile hem de farklı okuma yöntemleri ile desteklenmektedir. Bu araştırmada hiçbir zaman kesitleri yalıtarak, yalnızca bir öge ya da bir özellik dikkate alınarak tartışmak benimsenmemiştir. Dolayısıyla hikaye diyagramlarının taşıdığı mekan bilgisini hem biçim, hem de içerik kurmaktadır.
Üçüncü bölümde yer alan diyagramların net ve kesin şekillerde birbirinde ayrılmadığı söylense de en baskın mekânsal özellikleri üzerinden bir sınıflandırma önerilmektedir. 'Genişletilmiş mekanlar' hikayede var olan zihinsel hareketlerin hikaye mekanını kurduğu ve hikayede bahsi geçen mekanları genişletiyor olduğu söylenebilir. 'Çerçevelenmiş mekanlar' hikayedeki birbirinden bağımsız ögelerin hikaye içindeki hareketi zaman ya da mekan üzerinden çerçevelemesi ile özelleşebilir. Son olarak 'ızgara mekanlar' hikayedeki en güçlü mekan kurucu ögenin ritim olduğu hikayeleri tanımlar. Bu mekanlarda var olan güçlü ritim ile hikayenin hareketinin birbiri ile kurduğu ilişki açığa çıkabilir. Hareketin ızgarayı takip ettiği ve ızgaradan taştığı anları görebilmek hikaye mekanını anlamaya yardım eder.
Araştırmanın ikinci deneysel üretimi ise bir yaz atölyesidir. Bilgi Üniversitesi'nde bir grup tasarım öğrencisi Eduardo Galeano'nun Aynalar: Neredeyse Evrensel bir Tarih kitabını bir tür kent rehberine dönüştürmek ve Santralistanbul kampüsünün yakın çevresini bu kitaptan metinler aracılığıyla keşfetme deneyleri yapmıştır. Üstyazılı Yürüyüşler atölyesi, hikayelerin ve okuma eyleminin, kenti okumak üzere bir araca dönüştüğü ve mekan kurucu bir pratik olarak ele alındığı bir ortam sağlamaktadır. Bu atölye aracılığıyla hikaye okumanın mekan kuran özelliğinin bir eğitim modeli olarak imkanlarını tartışmak mümkün olmuştur.
Hikayelerin ve okuma eyleminin doğasında bulunan mekan üretme imkanlarının bu tezde keşfedilenlerden daha fazla olduğu, bahsedilen kuramsal ve deneysel çalışmaların mimari tasarım düşüncesinde çoğaltılabileceği söylenmelidir.

Abstract:
The reading experience and the spatial experience share a strong resemblance and this resemblance is the driving force of this thesis study. What are the characteristics of the spatial quality of the reading practices? Eventually, one of the main questions was which methods help stories to generate this spatiality?
The focus point of the study is how stories can build up spatial relationships by the means of different ways of narration, not their capacity of describing spaces. It is also crucial to understand how the spatial practices and tactics by the writer and the reader serve this spatiality. The narrative architecture studies which are obviously one of the widest research topics where stories and architecture meet, are not directly linked to this study. This is not a research to improve methods to design better story-like buildings, this study looks for ways of augmenting the stories' methods and tactics which generate a certain spatialiaty by the means of architectural design practices.
Structuralist and poststructralist theories help to relate the text, the writer and the reader with each other in terms of their capacities of creating the textual meaning. By the means of these theories, it is possible to discuss how the reader, who is supposed to be passive one, becomes the active one in the construction of the meaning and therefore the spatiality of the text. Here, one must recognize the meaning in the text is not a static one, it moves and transforms through the reading process so the very important concept of movement appears. Also, it may not be completed before the reading process, which means the total meaning of the text is a plurality of meaning created by the readers. The idea is that the reader carries his/her own luggage of text and while reading, the meaning becomes one with the ones he/she brought and the one which was already hidden in the text itself. With this perception, it becomes necessary to discuss the concepts of the distance, the movement and the displacement as the triggers of storytelling practices. These concepts seem to be very important while discussing the stories' spatiality in the field of architectural design theory. This is where the discussion becomes linked to the dimensionality and eventually the spatiality. Other than the meaning in the text, it is also the reader who moves along within the text. Therefore, this study pays special attention to the reader's both physical (the movement in between pages, the movement of the eye on a page) and mental movement (the connations, the rememberings etc.) while reading.
Stories are made up by four elements, says narratology: events, actors, time and place. Mieke Bal's perspective on the subject is very close to discuss within the spatial and architectural practices. So this comprehension was a starting point of the research, and a broader reading which compares the four elements in both disciplines, the narratology and the architectural practices, has been done. First fundemental element of the stories is the event. Events in narratology are defined as transitions between situations and actions; which are corresponded by the concepts of "event", "program" and "function" in architecture. Event is basically the actions, the movements and the decisions in a space and in a story. Secondly, anyone or anything mentioned in the story are actors and the concept of actor can relate to character, to personification of buildings, to subject-object discussions and to the opinion where architect is accepted as the subject in architecture. This is where the hierarchical balances are discussed in both fields. The third element time is conceived as duration in narratology and temporality is a wide area of study in architecture, which includes the temporality of the design process, the freezing of time when the design is over and the spaces of memory etc. The last element is the place of story, where the events take place which is thought as mainly the context of any architectural project. Any architectural project could be discussed within its place traditionally, and nowadays this comprehension is expanded also.
These readings between disciplines help discover differences and commons, and therefore new layers of discussion appear. Most importantly, it gets clearer that these concepts create meaning and movement as long as they are attached to each other. So the idea is not to study one element at a time, but to try to understand the spatial relations between them at a time. Which means, it becomes important to realize the spatiality in a story is organized by these four elements and their connotations in different spatial practices all together.
The fourth and the fifth chapters include experiments based on the theoritical base. The fourth chapter is where the spatiality of the stories are re-constructed. In this chapter, eight different story excerpts are re-read and these readings construct the story diagrams. While reading the story excerpts it is important to find out how the movement in the story is created. Since every story has its own way of creating the movement by its form and content, the readings also bring different methods while approaching the stories. Therefore, it is not possible to create a manual of rules of spatial reading out of these diagrams. Each diagram creates a unique way to recreate the spatiality in the stories. Here, it is important to have discussed the potentials of notations and diagrams in architecture. Diagrams' capacity to express the abstract and changeable qualities visually, help to rebuilt the spatial experience in a story. They are not working as translators or signifiers, they are reproducing the spatial relationships in a totally different medium. They don't freeze the movement or the meaning in the text, they basically try to re-imagine the potentials.
Since only the excerpts of stories are studied, it is possible to include them in the thesis. The idea behind is not to summarize any piece of text, so not to create a hierarchy between the reader of the thesis and the reader of the story. Also it is important not to focus on any of the four elements in each story, instead a multi-layered reading is proposed. This creates the possibility to observe the elements shifting roles each and every time.
It has been said that there are no clear rules or classifications separating these diagrams. Yet a classification according to their main spatial behavior has been proposed after mapping the diagrams in terms of different qualities. These main behaviours are differing as expanding the space, framing the space and organizing the space within a grid system. Three of the stories in this thesis are examples of the "expanding spaces". In these spaces, mental movements in the story build up the spatiality, and the places of the story (a road for example, or a threshold) are expanded. "Framed spaces" are those in which some irrelevant elements in the story start to play an equal role which creates a frame for the movement within the story.
And finally, two of the stories are classified as the "grid spaces" since the most characteristic quality of the movement in the stories is rhythm. Grid helps to see where the movement follows the equal intervals and where it exceeds the given intervals.
The second experiment of the study consists of a summer workshop called "Narrative Walkthrough" (Üstyazılı Yürüyüşler). During the workshop a group of students from Bilgi University discovered ways to create a city guide book out of the book The Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano. This is a book which offers different stories by means of different narration techniques. So that while working with only one book during ten days it was possible to find stories with different forms and contents. Narrative Walkthrough workshop has become a place where the potential of reading stories has been recreated as ways of reading the city. The question was to transform the text into a kind of filter which manipulates what is seen on the street and secondly to find a way to perform the story's spatiality as a walk. This way, it can be said that a site reading, driven by the story, has been made. This workshop has also been a laboratory to discover the potential of story reading's capacity to create spaces as a pedagogical method.
The possibilities within this field of research are not limited with the ones discussed in this thesis. Since the theoritical and experimental phases were ongoing simultaneously, the final chapter of the thesis has a mission to discuss these two seperate phases together. In the final chapter, it becomes visible that with the help of the theoritical knowledge, there is possibility to continue with more flourishing expoeriments in the future. These studies has the potential to be developped in both the theoritical and experimental areas.
In the future studies it seems to be inspiring to study the changing roles between the stories' characteristics and qualities in order to discover about the temporality and changeability of the architecture. Upcoming researches might focus on the stories' space generating qualities with a relative focus on space-time.