Paper-being introduces Istanbul to an alternative urban configuration. An urbanism that is not regulated over anthropocentric decisions but one that circulates around a material. Unveiling material’s inherit notions like continuity and complex relationality, the project tries materials—the inevitable actants of architecture—to choreograph an interspecies collective theatre. Drawing from Michel Serres’s “quasi-object” and Jane Bennett’s attempt to “give voice to thing-power”, it tries approaching matters as matter-beings: materials that cast life.

In Istanbul’s paperphile neighborhood, with paper collectors, printing press, and libraries of Kadıköy, paper-being sets the stage with existing actants for a connected gathering. Connections make the actants perform stronger within a network; otherwise left to fade into oblivion. As paper-being take over the leading actant of the built environment, it cares about initiating an empowering network while the decision on architecture is reduced to the materials in action. Contrary to the prevalent construction materials in Istanbul, paper is light allowing flexibility. And far from having the permeant destruction to past, it has a history of memory transmission. With this subtle attention, paper-being choreographs a process-based life in continuity, relationality, and connectivity for city actants.

You are invited to go through pages of a study that was designed on paper [with sketches], from papers [used as a material]. Paper-being had never been outside of papers and eventually evolves into a book [out of papers]. Speculating Victor Hugo’s declaration of printed book’s irreversible murder of architecture, let paper-beingexpress another assassination of architectural exhaustion in Istanbul.

Istanbul Technical University
Graduation Project, Jury F

paper-being