The 32nd International Architecture Students Meeting has been organized last year in Seferihisar with the theme “Design Village”. Holding studios of architecture and various disciplines, the organization hosted speakers and participators from different fields of profession.
The İzmir team of Design Village launches forth upon organizing the second edition of the event. Turning the village context into a working area once again, the Design Village organization will take place in Turgut Village of Seferihisar with the theme entitled “X, V, T – everywhere and nowhere” between August 27-September 5. Spreading over 10 days, the 6 days of the event will be dedicated to workshop studies. Interviews and various activities will be organized during the process.
Speaking of themselves and this year’s event, the İzmir team of the Design Village states:
“Architecture, industrial design, interior architecture, graphic design, landscape architecture…All of the disciplines related to design always appear as city-oriented practices in the form of what we learned in school and professional life. As students studying in design faculties, we need to perceive design from an urban scale during our graduate education. In fact, ‘design’ neither revolves completely around the city nor the academic education.
As Design Village, our primary goal is basically thinking, speaking and creating in between the intersections of the local informations of villages that hold a decreasing number of population due to the metropolitan acts and what we learn in schools. By putting potentials and technologies of the citizens aside, we focus on creating an informal learning and sharing space where we experience the production and social relations during our visits to villages, through a sense where time comparatively flows more circular.
X,v,t designate distance, speed and time which are the components of movement. Even though they do not conceptually indicate quantity all by themselves, facts like the complexity of ‘distance’, its non linear vital points; the ever-increasing ‘speed’ and the constant insufficiency of ‘time’ come to mind because of our initial way of thinking that centers upon the city. Does being everywhere mean being nowhere? Or belonging to nowhere?
We think that meditating in ‘village’ as a physical space containing this exact contrasts will bipartitely support the discussions and productions in a time where mobility and migration took the place for sedentariness. When we tried to read the mobility specific to our working area, the Turgut Village, it was impossible to evaluate it in social relations and fields of communication through pure observation. When considered on the basis of physical mobility, we can say that the commercial production in the village is the principal element for dynamism.”
