An architect can try to do all his best, but if the culture is unwilling to accept the value of buildings he is just wasting his time.
Not only is an architect challenged while designing and implementing artistic common sense during interdisciplinary collaboration, but what he gets built after the design process is also heavily vulnerable to constant civic sabotage and his intellectual intent to constant vandalization.
The process of making and preserving buildings is a social and civic art as much as it is an architects art. If the people of a culture is unwilling to accept the virtues of architecture, and does not realize it’s positive return to the quality and standards of their lifestyle; it means the architect is at the wrong place.
It’s safe to conclude that Adana is not yet ready for architecture. Maybe in a hundred years it will be.
It’s seems to me that the chaotic popcorn-like (high-rise sprawl) urban fabric is not actually a mistake or a product of negligence, but it is the preferred loose way of making cities, open to endless improvisations and interpretations.
The intellectual effort given to the planning of our cities are just one small step ahead of the neanderthal man’s village building mindset, 40.000 years ago. We are currently living in an amazon jungle of concrete.
If the problem of city planning is not addressed, there will be no good architecture, because urbanism and architecture are inseparable from each other.
The only solution is rational urban design and planning. A bold dense grid, with height limits and planned building footprints, which create walkable boulevards, green spaces and urban spaces, with little to no room for civic improvisations or interpretations.
If the urban and building codes were rational and strict, that pavilion which ruined my work wouldn’t have been there today.
Şahin K. Arıkoğlu 