Gokturk Ay-Tek Housing Landscape Design

The Ay-Tek Housing landscape project in Göktürk, Kemerburgaz was a challenge for us being landscape architects, because of the project’s plain and rational architecture which was
very uncommon for the Kemerburgaz neighbourhood. The house blocks were placed as four rows which face each other and a fifth one perpendicular to them. This layout system also had the potential to reinforce the pedestrian circulation. To both raise the consciousness of the sub-gardens and make a “readable” garden exist without doing any harm to the architectural clarity, an “excess of design” is chosen as a solution. This may also be considered as a game or a play. All inserted elements of the landscape have something in common with the architectural surroundings, even their forms don’t seem to bear any resemblance to each other. By this way, an environmental unity was achieved.

The gardens of the Göktürk Ay-Tek Houses are not created to show resemblance to the architecture of the project, but to be able to exist with it. It doesn’t seem possible at the first sight if the metal scructures originate from the architectural or the landscape design project, is a consciously created situation, in other words a “union of frequency”. A user standing in the garden has the impression of being in a place that is not exactly the same as the architectural mass, but in a different one sharing the same frequency with it.

The metal structure designed to underline the entrance axis has a scale in its own due to the blind walls, and it also includes a kind of independent garden. The plant materials used in the project have the same design language and also are among the most variant elements of the environment with their changing colours and textures depending on different seasons of the year. The small garden units encountered by the user while walking are perceived as “pocket gardens” and they are also the points where the green area perpendicular to the system can be watched from.

Kemerburgaz district is in the North of Istanbul, which means getting nearer to the Black Sea. The microclimate of the area is different from the center of the city and usually the weather is colder. Kemerburgaz is also a well watered area. But none of these conditions are current in the housing areas of Kemerburgaz. Although the characteristics of the area are ignored in most of the housing projects and artificial green areas are made, all plants used in Ay-Tek landscape project are deciduous in order to make the district’s colder environment more perceivable.