All Works

Bakırköy Mental Health and Neurological Diseases Training Hospital and Research Center

Masterplan Project

Fields

Field

Keywords

Pre-UA

Modular

System Design

Parametric

Location

Bakırköy, Istanbul, Turkey

Year

2008-2010

Urbanites +

Factsheet İndir

Machines of urban living, spying,

Species that capture the living

A dozen or more shells of voyeuristic devices,

Installed in public, watching the passersby

Prey to none, prone to fly,

Seizing their targets passing by,

Silent hunters, lidless eye,

Nested high, they never die.

Do you recognize the species?

Machines of urban living, spying,

Species that capture the living

A dozen or more shells of voyeuristic devices,

Installed in public, watching the passersby

Prey to none, prone to fly,

Seizing their targets passing by,

Silent hunters, lidless eye,

Nested high, they never die.

Do you recognize the species?

Bakırkoy Psychiatric Hospital sits on the 90 hectares over the D100 highway, a major west-east state road and a key artery for intercity transport and trade in Turkey with critical neighbors like an ambulance call center, Byzantine ruins and a women's and juvenile detention center. It is a giant cul-de-sac, offering vast green space within its scattered rundown building repository. The management's motivation for redesign and renovation is due to the need for quality of built space, earthquake resilience and modernization of the psychiatric healing space. The masterplan is carried out with multiscale investigations regarding the site and the program in order to create a platform for discussion and future regeneration for the site and the therapeutic spaces.

The site as well as the program reveal gradients of private/common, open/closed, secure/insecure, acute/emergent, specific/generic characteristics. Peculiarities like overhead planes every 15min (now less due to the new Istanbul airport), dense pine woods of 30hectares and a Byzantium archeological site are undersized by the minute sensibilities of the headspace.

The exemplary model proposed ample indoor and outdoor spaces, main focus on natural light, air flow and visual depth, with the provision of security through zoning rather than fences, activity and sports areas, community gardens and art studios. Separate room allocated for each patient, the ward's design is founded on dignity and choreography of the day, providing group therapy as well as individual treatment capacities.

Maintaining the collaboration of nurses, architects and doctors was the initial reflex to the task. Utilization of parametric modeling techniques was the other critical ingredient. In order to discover the potentialities of the site the team worked out multiple scenarios, evidence based design from extensive patient, visitor and personnel statistics, and physical characteristics of the site.