Author Archives: sahinarikoglu

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About sahinarikoglu

Architect and Urban Designer

FICTION – Tomsk 2046, Part 1, On Domestic Life

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It was a cold February afternoon at the -20’s celsius in the Siberian city of Tomsk. Lake Tom was fully frozen, and there were no signs of traditional winter swimming festivities around the river—another dying Russian tradition. Spending his 124th day without leaving his home, Arseny spent an hour between the unconscious and subconscious as he slowly woke up in his fully orthopedic bed. The past 4 years he had repetitive dreams of falling, in some dreams he was falling in an airplane and in other dreams he was falling down from a building, but the theme was all the same, a terrifying feeling of rapid descent. On some occasions his dreams haunted him for up to 3 hours after he had woken up. He wanted to get back on a normal sleep schedule, since he promised his newly divorced mom Alexandra that he would go with her to an all inclusive beach resort near the city of Latakia located in the Russian state of western Syria. He took a glance at his alarm clock which read 4:53 from a distance. From the day light outside he couldn’t discern wether it was morning or the afternoon, he had completely lost track of time. The clock for him was nothing more than meaningless numbers.

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Why Building Low-Rise Residential Buildings Is The Way of Nature

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Safranbolu

Typically, top levels of apartment units are most expensive, due to high demand. But if we were more in sync with nature, the bottom levels would have been priced higher.

Nature has endowed us with an immutable instinctual “fear of heights”, which is an evolutionary gesture that is hard-wired within us and is meant to protect us from falling. This alone should have made it pretty clear to us that mankind was meant to dwell not too high up in the air. But due to fierce societal competition especially among women, high levels are preferred and valued more in most societies especially in Turkey. People think they are more successful if they live higher than others in apartment buildings. Similar to the comparison of driving a BMW M5, as opposed to a Nissan X-Trailer. This desire to exhibit power to one another has alienated more important natural instincts. Continue reading

The Role of Water in Architecture

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Somehow water always seems to sneak into buildings. It finds a way and gets in. All it needs is less than a mm gap to penetrate the building. Constantly challenging an architectural work’s ability to provide perfect shelter. Not only an architect must beautifully defy gravity but he also has to beautifully deal with the hostility of different properties of matter such as water.

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