---
title: "Reporting from the Front, or Not"
canonical: "https://banuucak.com/en/darzana/"
date: "2016-08-05"
author: "Banu Uçak"
description: "At the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, Darzana, the Türkiye Pavilion, was a hybrid ship that answered the theme once I stood in front of it."
categories: ["essays"]
lang: "en"
---

That Is the Whole Question

![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/a1f27-1mwdfmuebhfwmuh3wq-5tha.CSIR_cfR_Z23WY9d.webp "Venice Architecture Biennale 2016 / Reporting from the Front. Photograph: Aslı Kotaman")

I can say that I came to know the city of Venice, and to love it, almost thanks to the Architecture Biennales. Since the 8th Venice Architecture Biennale, held in 2002, I have gone to Venice every two years. Frankly, though I do not get on well with parentheses this wide, the Venice Architecture Biennale has always excited me. I find it both clever and paradoxical that a chance for collective international thought about the built environment, and about architecture, should be made in a city frozen somewhere in time, turned almost into an open-air museum, flooded with tourists in all twelve months of the year, possessed of perhaps the worst and most expensive food and hotels in Italy, and with so few locals that one might say there are none. At every biennale, I think, architects of entirely different tendencies, from every corner of the world, form a magical contrast inside the world Venice has built upon never changing.

After biennales I had found a thousand faults with, calling them too academic, too much the market's business, too much installation, too analytical, too pleased with themselves, the curatorship of Alejandro Aravena excited me greatly. Of late Aravena has been a fresh breath rising from South America, brightening as it rises, the voice of architecture's conscience. For years, with Elemental, his own architecture initiative, he has worked on houses that can grow for people of small means, on shelter after disaster, and on participatory architecture, looking for ways to put the "human" at the centre without ignoring the aesthetic, monumental and cultural identities of architecture, and without reducing it to those alone. He rose from a seat on the Pritzker jury to holding a Pritzker, and crowned this at last with the curatorship of the Venice Architecture Biennale. When his theme for the biennale was announced, I understood that I would not be disappointed. Let me also say that when I hosted Aravena for a conference in 2011, while working at Yapı-Endüstri Merkezi, I admired his way of looking at the world, and his personality, as much as his architecture.

The theme "Reporting from the Front" is, for me, the never-ending question of the Servet-i Fünun era, "Is Art for Art's Sake?", translated into architecture. Like many of us, I feel deeply that architecture, under the machinery of stardom, has begun to go bankrupt, above all in the unlucky geographies of the world. I could not help thinking of my own country, which even that star system I criticise does not visit, whose dynamics are so often a short-term and savage capitalist drive, and which is urbanising wretchedly on every side, as almost an oasis for this biennale theme. As children of the last empire that history brought down, while that ruin still goes on transforming the history of the world and our personal histories, and while disasters of every kind beset us, displacement, migration, war and earthquake first among them, putting the human at the centre could be a reason for hope, even as no more than the work of a biennale.

Under the lead of İKSV, Türkiye had the chance, for the second time, to take part as a country, in a space of its own, at the Venice Architecture Biennale. You will remember that the preparation for the first biennale at which we were present with a national pavilion, in 2014, for the theme "Elements of Architecture", which again hit Türkiye dead centre, had been quite a closed circuit, and rushed. In that light I think it was a necessary and proper step that the İKSV team, listening to the criticism, gathered proposals for 2016 by an open call and assessed them with independent jurors. At the end of that process, the proposal called Darzana, by the team whose coordinator was Teğet Mimarlık, was chosen to represent Türkiye at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale. Before the biennale had even opened, this choice became quite a subject of debate in the architectural press of Türkiye. As far as I followed, the debates had two centres. The first was that Teğet Mimarlık, which was coordinating the project for the Rixos group, the group we understood to have leased the Haliç Shipyard for 49 years and to mean to develop it with a luxury yacht marina and a hotel, took part in the biennale with an installation that sprang from the heart of this disputed project and was built from pieces gathered at the shipyard. The second was the abstract, aestheticised appearance of that installation, which was thought to bring into the theme of the biennale none of Türkiye's potential problems in this sense. I followed all of the debates closely, but I waited to see the work with my own eyes.

![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/b5c40-15jevmsklzcbqkc6bkzrjma.CfPYWQ3B_ZoWuu.webp "Venice Architecture Biennale, Türkiye Pavilion, Darzana")

Let me say at the start what I would say at the end. I think Darzana is one of the works that stood apart among the national participations at the biennale, and one of the most successful. The moment I saw it, it was a magnificent and intelligent work, one that quietened my mind, that made me build the relation of the whole to its parts, that spoke to my inner world. Readers of this piece have probably, by now, followed the debates closely and seen the photographs of the Baştarda (a hybrid, a bastard ship) that travelled from the Haliç shipyard to the Arsenale in Venice. I believe this work, which makes visible the shift in meaning of language, of culture, of being Mediterranean, of hybridity, of the border and of the shore, suits the Venice Architecture Biennale very well. I should add that, frankly, before I saw it my feeling did not run this way. For the first time I did not walk the Venice Architecture Biennale with an architect. I went round the exhibitions with a friend, an academic working in visual culture. I witnessed how someone well equipped, and unaware of the debates then running, was moved by the power of the image and of language. For a while, in silence, we looked at the baştarda together.

![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/156c0-19d5rrpjyon6f1sj8ndrw5w.DbaKSZs0_Z6XjHa.webp "The Baştarda (bastarda), the hybrid ship that travelled from the shipyard in Istanbul to the Arsenale in Venice")

Could the work that went from Türkiye have been more political, more turned towards architecture and the problems of the moment? Absolutely yes. But a great many other things, besides that, could also have been. The force of an exhibition's subtext is in fact very important, yet I think its real success ought to be judged by the power of that idea to reach the viewer in a limited time. Otherwise it can be a thesis, an article, a book, but it cannot be an exhibition, or an installation. In this respect I think the Türkiye Pavilion is a very successful work.

I am not equally hopeful about the Haliç Shipyard side of the matter. Let alone the right of the citizen, and its historical weight: this place still holds the memory of my grandfather, a foreman for a large part of his life at the Haliç shipyard, and it has a large place in my personal history because one branch of my family was born in the Deniz-İş housing and went to the Deniz-İş middle school. I cannot approve a way of planning it that shuts me out, shuts us out, and closes it entirely to the public. Together with my personal history, this ground carries traces in the memory of the city that reach back even before Byzantine civilisation, and it does not sit well with me that it may be gentrified so far that the average inhabitant of Istanbul may never set foot there again. Whomever it was leased to, and whichever public interest was observed in the leasing, a part of me, of my family, of Istanbul's past, will always remain there.

The weight of the role that Teğet Mimarlık has played in this process, and will play, has already drawn them into debates that are plain to see, so I am sure they have already weighed the general benefit against the cost. There is also no doubt of their ability as a team, nor that, inside the "given" situation, they will produce one of the best solutions possible. But I am not sure those solutions will save them from the arrows of criticism.

Even so, I still think that the "beauty" of the work at the Venice Architecture Biennale has a side apart from this situation. I know how much context matters. But Darzana became, to my mind, a work that refers in no way to the architectural project produced at the shipyard, and that, far from legitimising the project, shakes the ground of the architectural work already under way and makes one question it, by insisting on the power of its context (perhaps without meaning to).

The magic of making is in fact here. Through the past thirteen biennales, when we had nothing in hand, there was naturally no debate either. The moment you begin to produce, the wheels start to turn, and potential energy becomes kinetic energy. I even think that, curiously, this work made people who knew nothing of the Haliç Shipyard process aware of it.

It is normal, from this point of view, that our architectural community, heirs of a society that does not even come near a culture of criticism, should pass through these debates with only light tremors. I try to read with care both the work that was put forward and every opinion shared in this frame, and to build my own view far from the feeling of taking sides. To every reader kind enough to read what I have written, that is also my humble advice.

*This text appeared in issue 417 of YAPI magazine, in the dossier "Venice Architecture Biennale".*