Can Kayaaslan Bartlett Application

CAN

can kayaaslan architect can.kayaaslan@gmail.com

+90 539 608 4877

AURA Istanbul - Design Researcher (Istanbul Architecture & Urbanism Research Academy)

TED Univesity administration office: Technical plan revising and footage

Volunteery Office Internship at PRO-GE Architecture

Office Internship

MAY-yapı Construction Studio

Management Board Member

TEDU Architecture and Design Society

personal work experience education

TED University Faculty of Architecture

Department of Architecture (English) Secondary Field: Global Citizenship %50 Merit Scholarship

GPA: 3.41 Honor Student

TED Ankara Collage High School Ankara, Turkey

Charles P. Allen High School

Nova Scotia, Canada (Exchange Program)

scholarship works

TEDU Administration Office Plan Revising - Intern

TEDU Course enrollment - Call Assistant

off-discipline

Rock Climbing: 3 years, Max Grade: Boulder: V8, Lead: 7B

Cardistry: 8 years

Photography & Video Editing: 4 years

fall-2022

summer-2020

winter-2021

autocad: rhinoceros: grasshopper: photoshop: illustrator: v-ray: sketchup: revit: procreate: blender: microsoft office:

2019-20

2019-2021

2020-

2020-

MİMED (Turkish Architecture Education Association) - MimED2022 21st “Project Awards for Architecture Students” - Selected Project for Exhibition

TSMD (Turkish Free Architects Association) 9th Architecture Students Competition: “Steps“ Selected Project to represent TEDU in exhibition

TEDU Faculy of Architecture Yearbook Features: Spring 2020, Fall 2021, Spring 2022

TEDU Happy Board Design Competition: 2nd Prize

New Life Interfaces: Cuhadaroglu National Design Competition: 3rd Prize

TMMIB 10th National Natural Stone Design Competition: 3rd Prize

INSPIRELI Beirut Port Competition: Participant

Istinye University - Tea House on Kadıköy

Competition: Participant

competitions & awards software skills

publications

Writer & Graphic Editor in the VOID MAG www.thevoidmag.com

Video Editor: PESAVEND Youtube channel www.youtube.com/c/pesavend

Wordpress architecture student weblog https://cankayaaslan.wordpress.com

2019-

2014-

2018-

english: turkish: german: 2020

languages

advanced IELTS 8.0/9

“Give shape, artist! Don’t talk!”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A resilient system for the Beirut port

-Oct-Dec 2021

-Instructors: Başak Uçar, Ziya İmren, Derin İnan, Alper Kiremitçi, Onur Özkoç

-Site: Beirut Port, Lebanon

-TEDU-Arch: arch401 studio

-Collabrators: Aykan Aras, Kutay Kaynak

-Contribution: research, concept, design, visual production

-Softwares Used: Rhinoceros, AutoCAD, Photoshop, Illustrator, Vray

This project reimagines the Beirut Port not only as a logistic and industrial node of transportation but also as an endless Freezone that can answer any economic or social demand the city asks from it.

For an urban system to be resilient it needs to be in harmony with its context and be able to adapt whenever the context changes.

The word camouflage comes from the research phase. Through the research phase of the project, it became evident that the city of Beirut is no stranger to the notion of crisis. The most visible marks of this are left from the Civil War between 1975 and 1990. The civil war left a cultural and a physical division border in the city, “The Green line”. The reason for the name “green” was the endemic plant species that took over the region over that 15 years. These plants were used as camouflage.

Camouflage is the keyword of this project. The word camouflage does not mean to hide. Rather, it means to be in a synergic relation with the background. In the case of designing a port, the city is the background. The foreground (the port) must always adapt to the background (the city). However, unlike a stable image, the city of Beirut is an ever-changing background. Thus, for the system to be resilient, it also needs to continually adapt, relate and respond to the city.

Looking from a more conceptual view camouflage actually existed everywhere in Beirut. Different cultures, religions, and nationalities are camouflaging into each other in a melting pot.

This project offers something Beirut is already capable of doing, being resilient and adapting. In addition, it provides a solid system to make adaptation consistent and efficient.

ROAD HIERARCHY

To achieve this systematically there has to be constants and variables. The constants for the project are, the Passenger Terminal, the Silo as a Memorial, the Shipyard, the Container Terminal, A longterm Housing Project, and two Tensile Structures.

There are also variable elements with various timeframes approximating how often they will be changed. Daily variables: Platforms of the Modulor Shoreline and Shadings. Weekly: Light Structures and Containers. Monthly: Open Spaces, Temporary Housing Units, and Power stations. Long-term: Markets and Warehouses. Cranes are a unique variable since they help everything else to be constructed and manipulated.

The 1/1000 site plan is only a possible instant frame from the project. The constants are going to stay as they are, but any variable on the plan might change one day later. Dynamic context requires dynamic designs.

The Passenger Terminal works together with the modular shoreline. The Silo is a memorial with many open spaces around it. It is a symbol for resilience of the city. The Shipyard is placed on the third dock as a place to repair damaged ships. the Container Terminal uses an automized rail system for maximum efficiency. The large Tensile Structures can house any activity from sports games to concerts. The Long-Term housing project close to the city along the highway is both a solution to the current homelessness situation and a precaution for the future. With such precautions backed up by stable systems, the city will camouflage its way through any crisis.

THEORY TO PRACTICE

These variable elements come together in different combinations to make clusters able to serve different fuctions for people to use. Clusters include; Market Areas, Exhibitions, Gathering Zones, Supply Zones, Workshops, Concert and Activity areas, and a Bazaar. People of Beirut are free to gather the elements and construct any of these clusters when they need them. They are even open to create a new cluster with a new combination. It is all open for contribution. To make this system more user-friendly, the project provides a catalog, with all elements and clusters.

The comic in the catalog shows possible solutions for two scenarios. It shows the best ways to approach a possible festival or an emergency situation at the Port. The system can indeed handle both situations. There is also an app for people to use that helps them to easily navigate and learn about the nearby elements, to make construction more efficient. A shoreline can quickly become an open-air cinema overnight. All of the smaller elements are thought to be stored in the nearest warehouse and transported to the needed area quickly.

Spaces for Creation in a city of Debris

-April - June 2022

-Instructors: Başak Uçar, Ziya İmren, Derin İnan, Alper Kiremitçi, Onur Özkoç

-Site: The Egg Cinema, Beirut, Lebanon

-TEDU-Arch: arch402 studio Final Project

-Softwares Used: Rhinoceros, Photoshop

This project is a complex involving 6 clusters with different programs, an auditorium, an event building, a library, a teaching zone, an activity center an office building. The most significant cluster comes as an extra and surrounds all other clusters, the creation hubs. The site has an existing structure the Egg, which used to be a cinema, but is now in ruins. Egg holds great signifigence in the urban memory as it has gone through the civil war and now is a symbol for the people of Beirut. The project aims to preserve and retro-fit this old structure into the design. Also there is an important square, The Martyrs Square 300 meters away from the site. Where people of Beirut use to make protests and events. It is important to keep the two sites visually connected.

The special aim of this project is to find design inputs solely through analysis and research. Research about the qualities of program elements, the context, the history, the expected user profile… all of these factors contribute to and trigger a design method and develop a pattern language to use in the project. The outcome of this method is intricate by its nature because the ideology of the project depends on the involvement of creativity (and indirectly beauty) in every aspect of life. Whether a person is working, studying, or being entertained they must always have a chance to produce and be exposed to creative outputs. This is what the project is trying to achieve.

RESEARCH & THEORY

This design process starts with an attempt to develop a method to analyze and relate programs. Based on their inner spatial qualities, each element gets evaluated on spectrums. Then they are evaluated based on their potential relation types to outside. After this analysis, the programs are grouped. To find the relations between elements another wave of analysis is applied. The groups become clusters when the elements inside are well related. When the clusters are ready the contextual research begins and a set of fields for the site are produced. These fields lead to massing decisions. To find the relations between the clusters, similar evaluations on larger scales are made. Also, an analysis of the user profile is made, which shows the significance of creation hubs, and how users of these hubs will spend the most time and will be the most involved with the rest of the building.

ANALYSIS OF SPATIAL QUALITIES

The people of Beirut named this site in front of the Egg cinema as Agora. This initiated another layer of the design theory. In the Maslowian hierarchy of needs, the Agora as a space serves the highest category of “self-actualization”. Creation itself is a higher form of action than satisfying in the needs of survival, economy, emotion… It is at that point where they can where creation becomes critical in the design. As a modern interpretation of the traditional agora instead of being framed with elements on each side, this agora flips the morphology inside out and spills around the elements, then rather than being sharply divided with them, the agora gets involved with everything it finds. This is what makes it unregistered. A user inside any of the other clusters has the chance to be involved with the creation hubs. They can observe, create and rest.

ANALYSIS FOR CONTEXTUAL DECISIONS

GROUPING OF PROGRAMS FOR CLUSTERS

FIELDS OF THE SITE

USER PROFILES

REINTERPRETATION OF PUBLIC SPACE

MASSING DECISIONS

ADDING CREATION HUBS

LEAVING SPACE FOR CREATION

The creation hubs have three zone types for three aspects of attractive and comfortable creation space. Resting (physical & mental), Showing (process & products), and Creation (research & production), all of these aspects demand different spaces and they coexist in the creation hubs. They are also quite flexible as the inner furniture is completely free to be re-adjusted by the users, and create in an environment they are comfortable in.

It is possible to experience all these creation hubs without being involved in any other program elements. You can enter a creation-hub from anypart, go through sequential creation hubs and exit from the other side. Only going through these creation-hubs is an experience by itself and this can also take you anywhere in the building you need. It functions both a network of circulation and a working space.

LONGITIDUNAL SECTIONS

FLOOR PLANS

03 PROJECT 2196

Architecture of collabration: Humans and Artificial Intelligence

-September 2021

-Collabrator: Kutay Kaynak

-Contribution: concept, design, visual production

-Site: Fictional Future

-Çuhadaroğlu National Competition: Third Prize

The project takes place in the year 2096, in a fictional future where humans have given permission to artificial intelligence to alter their living spaces in hopes of becoming extremely provident and let the nature heal.

To de-accelerate the immense amount of pollution and waste made in the last 200 years artificial intelligence takes all measures possible to make energy and material savings. It’s aim was to have as little consumption as possible and no waste at all. The buildings it designed were functioning perfectly as a system and humans were getting their basic needs met.

Yet this design had no attention to human privacy, and psychology, only priority was to keep humans alive. The design was made to be circulated by robots as efficiently as possible with tubes in the center of the structure.

To cut down on wasting energy humans were not allowed to cook, clean or use water themselves. There were not even seperator panels between cabins in the washrooms to not waste extra materials. Each family was given one single bunk to sleep in. The roof of the structure had greenery to help rebalance the ecology, yet there was no human access to it. Humans did no leave these these boxes of emotionless architecture for 100 years.

In the year 2196 artificial intelligence decided there is no need for extreme measures anymore, the world was going back to normal. In the last century, man, living in constraints, could no longer resist the desire for his soul-feeding needs. The time of renewal for humanity has begun.

People began to change their lives in line with their own ideas. Individuality and privacy

A web-like base made of stone to measure the age of a tree

-October 2021

-Collabrator: Kutay Kaynak & Aykan Aras

-Contribution: research, concept, design, drawings

-Site: Antalya, Turkey

-IMMIB National Natural Stone Design Competition: Third Prize

Trees are an essential part of the urban experience. We see them and interact with them in our daily lives. Even Though they are alive just as much as we are we usually perceive them as static dull objects. Just because the timeframe for their growth is longer than our usual rate of perception, does not mean they are static.

“AĞ-AÇ” is a web-like base made of stone to measure the age of a tree. A tree grows from the center and widens its radius over years. The consecutive frames of the design gets shattered as the

tree outgrows an estimated radius. This design creates concrete evidence in front of our eyes to remind us that trees are moving just like us. In hopes to create some empathy towards trees, and not view them as static objects anymore and give them the same value of any other living thing.

05 DATA VISUALIZATION

A Map for Meanings - Symbols of Civilization

-June 2022

-Individual Project

-Subject: Meanings of Symbols across Cultures

-Arch434 Mediascapes Course

-Instructor: Başak Uçar

“Human cultures use symbols to express specific ideologies and social structures and to represent aspects of their specific culture. Thus, symbols carry meanings that depend upon one’s cultural background. As a result, the meaning of a symbol is not inherent in the symbol itself but is culturally learned.” - Mari

Womack

No symbol is designed by a single individual. They are molded and shaped through time by a society, where each interprets it individually. Thus meaning of a symbol is usually more than one word, a symbol can represent multiple words or even a story. The meanings are vague and even flexible. This is why such a chart can never be “accurate”. Attaching one word to each symbol means to simplify the symbol’s meaning. Knowing this the visualization tries to give a general idea of what these cultures value, believe and what they find meaningful.

This project compiles data of symbols from cultures across the world. From the Far East to Europe, to Africa and North America it covers 358 different symbols. On the left side of the chart there is a categorized list of these from top to bottom (east to west), with sub categories based on location and time period in history.

On the right side there are the list of meanings. The meanings are categorized into seven with a color to each. This is done in reference from both ancient teaching of Chakras from far east and Modern Western Psychology. In total there are 120 meanings/emotions/ states that all the symbols refer to.

Looking at the final image it is possible to read the correlations through the colors attached to each culture. Like the close relation of Aztec culture with the concept of death. Vikings with war. Celtics with feritilty…

“symbols are the visible signs of invisible realities”

- St. Augustine

A Manifesto Explaining the Need for Needless Spaces in Cities

-Fall 2022 - Ongoing Research Project

-Site: Tophane, İstanbul, Turkey

-AURA Istanbul 2022 Fall Research Studio

-Instructors: Ersen Gürsel, Ayşegül Kuruç

The spaces we live in and the activities we do are governed by needs. We have physical, social, material and spiritual needs that we must constantly meet. The jobs we work and the services we provide are for the needs of other people (and in return we get our needs met by earnings). There is a cycle of consumption and production for consumption, completely governed by needs. This may seem like all life is. However there was an activity in ancient Greece that was above the needs. The activity of “Praxis” is free from the needs of Production and Consumption.

Although many philosophers have defined Praxis differently, the project was shaped by the interpretation of Hannah Arendt and her theory of vita activa. Praxis simply means “activity which man creates and changes his world and himself”. It is one of the three categories of human activities in Aristotle’s political theory. In the interpretation of political philosopher Hannah Arendt there are three types of human activities. “Labor”, “Work” and “Action” (praxis). Labor: all activities a person does to meet needs. It covers factors that are essential for our survival, such as eating and sleeping. Work: encompasses everything we produce outside nature (construction, crafts, art). Work gives tangible outputs, and these outputs ensure the continuity of society and indirectly enables the individual to continue consuming. Praxis, on the other hand, is human activity free from the concern of producing and consuming.

The hierarchy of needs is usually thought of as a pyramid where one needs to satisfy the levels of needs below to move up. First one has to consume to satisfy their physical needs, then they must produce to contribute to society in any way. Nietzche thought only at that point an individual with fulfilled needs (an übermensch) can think beyond needs and make political decisions for the greater good.

However Arendt does not see this hierarchy in a linear fashion. She claims one can take political action even when their basic needs are not met. This ability is what makes us human and it is the driving force of human civilization. So rather than a pyramid, the hierarchy of human condition is more like an iceberg for Arendt. This Iceberg

is in a “sea of needs”. Of course it is in our nature to exist in water (satisfy our needs), we are living organisms after all. However civilization is an effort of going beyond our nature. We need to be under the water to satisfy our needs. But we also need to keep reaching for the light. Because it is dangerous to only exist underwater, the sunlight becomes dimmer as the water gets deeper. An advancement in the water, for the water is not an advancement that will get us any closer to light. These types of advancements just make existing in water easier, not better. And they provide no real progress. Thus real progressive decisions can only be made when we are out of water. Looking forward and seeing a clear sky. In a place where we are free of needs. Greeks used to do this with Agoras. Public Squares with no functions attached to them.

This project is a research to understand and find solutions for the balance of needless and needful spaces. Also it starts with an acknowledgement that the lack of praxis in a modern context is a sociological problem beyond architecture. It is not possible to solve it only with architecture. The task of architecture is to at least prepare the ground on which this problem can be solved. Because; In a city without truly public spaces, the public activity of praxis cannot be expected.

To discuss the topic, the project takes the Tophane district of Istanbul as the subject. After the construction of the Galataport in the Tophane district and the ongoing irregular urbanization, the use of public space has lost its openness to the public and has become privatized. Galataport occupies the Tophane District with consumption spaces and considers individuals as customers. However, Tophane-i Amire, Sanatkarlar Park and Byzantine Wall Ruins behind Galataport are open spaces that have not yet fallen victim to the consumption cycle in the region. Although these monumental open spaces have circulation problems in themselves, they have a great potential public spaces they can bring to the district. The project develops design proposals in these areas and aims to provide circulation routes and “praxis” spaces within monumental spaces through the cooperation of regions.