New Babylon: Discrepancies of utopia and possibility of situationist architectures

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mimarlık Fakültesi, Mimarlık Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2017

Öğrenci: GÜNEŞ DUYUL

Danışman: GÜVEN ARİF SARGIN

Özet:

The project of New Babylon, the foremost imagination of Constant Nieuwenhuys, is still regarded as an incarnation of the ideals of the Situationists over the contemporary city and everyday life. In this regard, an extensive re-reading of New Babylon with its unceasisngly contested positions, is believed to constitute a much broader discussion into post-war avant-garde architecture and urbanism. Beyond all contradictions, some of the critical aspects of New Babylon seems to fade away because such notions as détournement, as explicitly coined by the Situationist International, for instance, were forced into constant misinterpretation. It is, therefore, the notion of détournement has to be revisited as one of the key concepts not only to provide anew theoretical framework for further discussions of “situationist architectures”, but also to foster new methodic devices to cope with some of the shortcomings of today’s spatial production. It is one of the objectives of this inquiry that with help of the said concept that of détournement, this research questions if bottom-up guerrilla architecture could still be possible as genuinely manifested by the members of the Situationist International.