Life-in-Between
Arada Bir Yaşam (appl. in 2024)
In Turkey, buildings are often positioned primarily as income-generating assets. Within this economic logic, residential structures representing the modernist era are rapidly replaced, frequently without recognition of their architectural heritage value or the social life cultivated within them. As a result, not only physical forms but also accumulated memories, relationships, and everyday practices disappear. Life-in-Between was motivated by a need to bring to light the aesthetic qualities of Ankara’s 1960s and 1970s modernist apartment buildings and to uncover the socio-cultural layers constructed through years of habitation. How can residential buildings be understood not merely as financial commodities, but as lived environments and integral components of a coherent urban fabric?
Life-in-Between seeks to reinterpret modern residential buildings as living bodies shaped by both architectural intention and community life. By foregrounding the life that unfolds “in between” apartments, across staircases, balconies, shared courtyards, and everyday encounters, it aims to reveal the convergence of aesthetic form and social meaning. Participants investigate both the structural and environmental qualities of selected buildings and the collective experiences embedded within them. Through dialogue with residents and in-situ observation, they assess how aesthetic attributes and socio-cultural practices intersect, contributing to a more holistic understanding of residential heritage.
Life-in-Between integrates literature, music, and graphic arts into place experience, transforming conventional architectural analysis into an affective and interpretive process. Rather than limiting evaluation to stylistic features, participants translate spatial knowledge into manifestos and visual compositions. Artistic interfaces become tools for articulating emotional responses, shared memories, and layered perceptions of the built environment. By merging aesthetic reading with creative production, the program constructs affective assemblages that connect individual impressions with collective meaning. In doing so, it reframes residential buildings as foundational units of urban life, extending discussions of urban transformation beyond physical renewal toward cultural continuity and lived experience.
The program unfolds through three interconnected phases. In Reading the Aesthetics, participants assess selected buildings through aesthetic lenses, conduct group site documentation, and establish dialogue with residents to understand both form and lived reality. During the Search for New Expressions, they explore artistic interfaces, including poetry, writing, drawing, photography, painting, video, and music, to represent spatial observations and evoke affective responses. Finally, in Co-creation, participants produce creative posters that synthesize individual and collective reflections on the buildings’ aesthetics and the life unfolding within them.
The program culminated at the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality Contemporary Arts Center, where the co-created posters were exhibited as part of the annual exhibition of the Ankara Chamber of City Planners, inviting a wider public to reconsider the meaning of modern residential heritage.
Main Goal
Life-in-Between explores the lived and aesthetic identities of Ankara’s modern apartment buildings by documenting their architectural and everyday-life qualities. Through affective mapping and artistic interfaces, participants investigate creative ways of expressing how these buildings are experienced, felt, and inhabited, revealing their role in shaping collective memory, emotion, and urban life.
Art Interfaces
Graphic design, literature, active music listening.
Place/s
Ankara’s modern apartment buildings from the 1950s–70s embody an aesthetic modernism that once shaped everyday urban life. Rational plans, balconies, and climate-responsive details produced a coherent aesthetic and livable density. Today, this architectural and cultural value is being lost: piecemeal urban transformation replaces modernist housing with generic blocks, eroding the city’s mid-century identity, neighborhood fabric, and the modernist aesthetic that anchored Ankara’s everyday urban culture.
Story
Apartment buildings that represent Ankara’s modern architectural heritage are increasingly under threat of disappearance through urban transformation processes. Structures that once shaped the urban identity of Republican Ankara are being replaced by buildings that often produce spatial alienation rather than continuity.
In response, we selected eight apartment buildings in Küçükesat and Kavaklıdere neighborhoods and sought to articulate both their lived identities and their structural aesthetic qualities through artistic interfaces. To do so, we conducted a series of interviews with residents to understand everyday apartment life. In parallel, we interpreted how environmental aesthetics qualities are manifested within these buildings.
Participants translated their readings of apartment life and aesthetics into creative posters, while also expressing their interpretations through written manifestos. Through this process, the project aimed to make visible the cultural, emotional, and spatial values embedded in Ankara’s modern apartment buildings.