Blockade

Inspired by Michel Foucault’s understanding of the underground as a process of constructing alternative narratives—both physical and symbolic—against dominant systems of power, the project explores how architecture can embody this resistance spatially. Foucault emphasizes that knowledge is inseparable from power, and what is accepted as “truth” often serves to reinforce hegemonic structures. Building on Herbert Marcuse’s observation that modern life produces one-dimensional individuals operating within a flat, two-dimensional field of politics, the project introduces the underground as a third dimension: a critical space where opposition, thought, and bodily experience can unfold.

Within this theoretical framework, the project addresses how bodies, shaped by systems of power, can reclaim their agency through spatial experience. Drawing from the Frankfurt School’s critique of modern subjectivity, it reflects on the difficulty of generating opposition in a world where individuals are confined within structures of “truthful” knowledge and urban order. Historically, public space served as a ground for encounter, discussion, and dissent. Yet modernization has distanced the public sphere from the body, transforming it into an object of regulation—an image of publicity controlled by authority. The project therefore questions how architecture can re-establish the lost connection between the body and the public realm, and how dissident thought can materialize through spatial action.

Referring to Lefebvre’s notion that social space emerges through bodily practices, and Tschumi’s idea that architecture exists in the tension between concept and experience, the design transforms the act of descent into a critical gesture. The underground is no longer a space of concealment but of revelation—where suppressed ideas and bodies gain visibility through movement, touch, and encounter.

BLOCKADE
In this context, the project unfolds a spatial configuration that constructs dissident bodies by deconstructing a space (parking garage) built through a process where dissident thought has been suppressed and ignored, transforming this invisible space into a public void that fosters dissident thinking.
This space asserts itself through five sequential steps:

"SILENCE" — The parking garage, built in a process where dissident thought has been suppressed and ignored, continues to exist.

"DISSOLUTION" — A designed surface that will construct dissident bodies begins to dissolve the parking garage.

"REVELATION" — With the onset of dissolution, this invisible space produces public voids and transforms into a space for dissident thought.

"DESCENT" — Alongside the public voids, the dissident thought space relocates its public ground underground.

"ENCOUNTER" — The underground public ground and dissident thought spaces meet the surface-level publicity.

The dissident thought space, which formed by dissolving the parking garage, is organized around five main program elements: Where are you? (Passive body), Pull yourself together (Awareness), Educate yourself (Learning phase), Whisper into public space (Leaving a trace), and Touch what’s yours (Intervention). These main program elements hierarchically create three levels within the dissident body formation process. While the upper levels emphasize opposition and the individual’s exploration of personal ideas, the lower levels foreground spaces for production and leaving traces, supporting the individual’s presence as a dissident body in the public realm.

Location: Beneath the existing parking structure in Kültürpark, İzmir/Turkey
Area: 10,000 m² (built)

Structure System:
Reinforced concrete frame of the existing parking structure partially retained; new steel and composite additions introduced through dissolution zones to emphasize contrast between the existing and the emergent.

Spatial Organization:
The project’s five sequential stages—Silence, Dissolution, Revelation, Descent, Encounter—are spatially articulated through a vertical circulation system. Each level corresponds to a phase in the transformation of both body and space: from the visible and static to the hidden and active.

Designer: Berk Kandemir
Instructors: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ebru Yılmaz, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ülkü İnceköse, R.A. Ceren Ergüler