New York firm Dror today unveiled designs for a collosal artificial island to be created right off the coast of Turkey, not far from Istanbul. The project, dubbed HavvAda, is envisioned to rise from the sea by piling up one billion cubic meter of soil carved out of the main land from the construction of the proposed Canal Istanbul, another ambitious mega project currently proposed to run parallel to the Bosporus. Inspired by Buckminster Fuller, six gigantic geodesic domes will lift up artificial hills on the island which will be covered with residences and commercial buildings for a population of several hundred thousand people.
Find a detailed project description and images courtesy of Dror below.
A century after the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed; Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan presents the Canal Istanbul project and offers to re-visit the map of the city. One billion cubic meter of soil may be carved out of the main land in order to create the canal. Turkish developer, Mister Serdar Inan, proposes to reconstitute the soil to create an island off the shore of Istanbul and a home for a new community. Mister Inan commissions New York based designer Dror Benshetrit to draw his vision for the project; one that blends innovative design ideas, state of the art technology and cultural legacy with inspirations from the work of chief Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan.
Like the Nurai Island in 2008, this project came to Dror as the most-unexpected chance to investigate the idea of the living environment at a scale his mind had never touched before. Dror chose to look at the intimidating project as an opportunity to think about urban design and the life of a community. He spearheaded a reflection group to explore ideas. The team of experts included the Buckminster Fuller Institute, Buro Happold, Shoji Sadao from Fuller, Sadao & Zung Architects. Six months of rich interdisciplinary dialogs have allowed him to draw a radical urban design vision that aims to make the island a home for a new community with the highest quality of life and a positive environmental impact. Dror's vision for HavvAda is one that raises question rather than one that intends to bring answers.
The vision unveiled in Istanbul on September 29, results from Dror's fascination for structure and spatial geometry. With HavvAda, he stretches physics principals that he has long investigated such as the Quadror geometry. He offers to revisit concepts and ideas for urban environment, such as urban design theories, including the Garden City by Ebenezer Howard and studies of Buckminster Fuller's legacy in structural engineering. Today, Dror has drawn a landscape that will keep adapting to the dynamics of the site.
A green island made of 6 hills of different sizes circling the downtown center of the land. Each hill up rises on top of a mega structural sphere that supports the residences on the hillsides and a community life at the center. The diameter of the island is 3 km long with a 1 km diameter valley in the center.
Each hill is drawn as a mega-dome structure inspired by engineering and structural principals studied and implemented in architecture since ancient times and further developed as a geodesic dome in the last century by Buckminster Fuller.
The design proposed for most of the island relies on compression and tensional integrity; it maximizes the material utilized to build the structure and infra-structure of the island. The urban planning optimizes the slopes of the hills and their panoramic view on each side for greater residential areas.
Traditionally, communities have built their residential areas around the center of the town where political decisions or trade was made, and spiritual and religious temples were built—the community would grow around those centers with extended skirts of residence buildings and neighborhoods. The center valley of the island offers ideal space and planning for parks and recreation centers. Some of the buildings are covered with green living-roof. They fade in the natural environment in an organic way, while contributing to the constant energy recycling of the island.
A vision for a new (infra)-structural grid:
Can a 3d urban grid allow better performance?
The vision for HavvAda proposes to expend the urban grid model to a new dimensionality. Conventional building construction requires major subterranean structures. This has long raised environmental concerns. Dror explores design ideas for a new mega structural system that aims to maximize energy and structural efficiency.
The buildings become horizontal—circling the hills at different levels. They are all connected to one another and grounded at the peripheral base of the hill.
Dror's vision for HavvAda explores the consistency of principles in geometry and physic at any scale
Dror has long been fascinated by the intrinsic connections between geometry and physics and the principles involving the two. The entire design vision for HavvAda revolves around two geometrical forms and their structural principles: the sphere and the triangle. When investigating both the quadror geometry and the geodesic dome of Buckminster Fuller, Dror and his team started to identify structural efficiency in the combination of both. The two geometric systems present unique structural advantages and become exponent to one another when combined. These geometrical principles are implemented in the design vision for HavvAda; linking altogether the master grid, the urban planning, the transportation grid and the structural support systems of the buildings.
The hills result from the structural net covering the domes. The residential buildings are connected to one another through this structural net. Each building is supported and plugged to the triangular structure of the geodesic dome; using the QuaDror system for their individual support.
QuaDror is a structural support system and a design innovation that Dror's studio has developed and unveiled a year ago. It implements the forces and the efficiency of the triangle geometry in its 4 lateral sides. These allow for very strong and light building with glass walls and maximum light.
The geodesic domes and the structural mesh upon them combine tension and compression for maximum structural efficiency. The domes are mega-structures ranging from 230 meters to 400 meters. The mega-mesh structures are very strong and light-weighted volumes that contribute to the infrastructural grid of the island. Dror proposes to envision an energy recycling system that would be integrated within each mega structure and redistributes the energy throughout the hill.
Do the technological tools available today allow for us to build a net-positive eco-system?
The design intention is to create a manifold eco-system that allows for a net-positive community. Each hill may present its own eco-system with a fully integrated energy renewal operation. The hill slopes can include energy recycling systems connected to one another and to the valley at the center of the island through the grid. These systems may provide great heating and cooling efficiency to the inside of the dome. The structural grid of the island may integrate or circuit the water waste recycling management. The steep slopes of the hill also act as a natural ventilation system. In Dror's vision, both the wind and the rain water are recycled and utilized for the operation of the community life.
We aim for the 6 micro-environments to set the ground for a community that produces more energy than it consumes. The agricultural opportunity may take advantage of the different micro-climates at different heights of the hill slopes to create a variety of vegetation and culture.
HavvAda transportation
The transportation grid of the island is drawn upon the particularity of its master-planning and the equi-distance between the center of the island and the center of each hill. A personal rapid transportation system as well as cable cars and walkways allow direct access from one hill to the other or to the downtown center.
Activity centers shall be housed in the heart of the geodesic dome of each hill—easy to access with cable cars and through the rapid transportation grid. These centers offer Education, Entertainment, Health and Sport centers as well as Business Districts.
Project Details:
Location: Istanbul, Turkey
Program: 16,535,000 m² master plan
Status: design concept
Collaborators:
19 Comments
somehow reminiscent of Ingels and his interest in hills..
When land is altered on such a massive scale, the artificiality is unappealing. Look at those islands in Dubai. Nobody really wants to live there.
This rendering firm is being a total tool for one of the biggest ecological disasters might ever be endangering Thrace. Cappadocia analogy is extra shallow.
Yeah, Canal Istanbul seems to me like an extremely sinister project aimed at literally separating Istanbul from Europe, and I imagine Serdar Inan must have tossed Erdogan's salad a few times. I doubt the firm who drew this project for them has the slightest idea what they are getting involved in. Sad, really.
"Mister Serdar Inan" that says it all. A total regime fraud. Btw, real estate bubble in Turkey has just burst. Taking with it all these type of fraudulent speculations.. These renderings are architectural decline at their best.
it is not fox news here...
do you have anything to say about the project?
Looks like something Albert Speer would have done if he where an environmentalist.
Orhan I bow to your opinion on the terrible implications of this project ever actually being built.
But OMG I find those renderings unbelievably sexy! The space inside the domes would be so cool, in a Logan's Run sort of way!
Juan, whatever. Sure it is a project by definition, an unbuilt speculation.
You should not play straw man with me and directly go into whatever subjective/objective commentary you have without involving website, publication etc.. Archinect publishes all kinds of projects it deems to be worthy of public commentary. And you don't have to agree with them. That is the beauty of this site.
More on the subject matter.
I happened to know the backstory about these projects involving the influence of current government of Turkey and their cohorts. This is on top of obvious shortcomings of the project most people are able to detect quickly by just taking a one look at the renderings.
What sets me off, in addition to shallowness and ecological irresponsibility of this particular project, even though it is tabled as "green," I am also aware of the whole political, speculative and propaganda context of these type of projects AK Party uses. I know of their particular brand of so called "Çılgın Projeler" (crazy/spectacular projects) and their translation to political gain and influence on land speculations, locally.
I am glad at least you see the flaws of the this specific concept from the architectural point of view.
By the way, Black Sea is one of Earth's most sensitive waters that has already threatened by the continuous toxic discharge of Danube River and after effects of Chernobyl disaster. It is like Europe's cesspool at the moment. An ecological case study and place of global urgency. This project does nothing to mitigate any of it and supports an idea that might change the salt content, temperature, sea life just to name a few. It essentially threatens the delicate balance of Aegean Sea and further down Mediterranean via the Sea of Marmara and Dardanelles Straight. If you interested much more information is available in the internet.
I'll leave you with a funny bit of "Mister Serdar Inan" who eludes in an article, "It is all Allah's imagination" while asking donations from nuevo speculative religious community to support this purifying project. This so called visionary stuff he is speculating on. I will exit the conversation with this furniture to decorate the "moderate Islam" condominiums on the island...
These people are also behind these kind of cartoonized show offs as well.
so near the water and yet...so far. the idea of an island is turned inside out. the insides of the spheres are more accessible than the seashore. in that sense, the formal concepts are rather counter-intuitive within the island context . must one really transit though a megamall everyday just to get anywhere?
Which way is south?
Juan, please, no reason to apologize...
Your commentary is pretty observant of general feeling of Turkish condition. For most Turks it is a fantasy project at best, and for more architecturally educated ones, it is what you see, a brain burst...
I wrote about the more sinister side of it.
To my occasionally twisted mind, it really looks like a threesum silicon breasts. Kind of over the top for a pious clientele.;.)
In Tayyip's definition: Ucube.
http://translate.google.com/#auto/en/ucube
Also, "Havva" is "Eve" in Arabic and Hebrew. So, the brand is "Eve's Island." Boobs and other curvatures explained...
Additionally, chatter to revitalize neo colonialist Ottoman pipe dreams are no use for modern Turkey. The article whiffs of these stinking references. Leave Sinan alone.
nice renderings Peter.
- Chris
I'm all for creativity but this idea bounds on the point of absurdity. The world is facing major crisis in regards to our environment- loss of species, disappearing arctic ice, melting Greenland and Antarctic ice and the need for the development of dependable clean/green energy.
Architects are problem solvers (at least that's what I teach my students). The architecture profession would serve the world better by placing their energies and creativity by working with scientists and engineers to solve the real problems of this planet; not in placing a landfill island on top of a major tectonic fault line.
These comments are not meant as an insult to Dror, but a call the profession to reassess their focus and current paradigms.
It is a very nice eclectic proposition composed with several ideas picket from here and there (Buckminster Füller, Frei Otto, Namba Parks Hanging Gardens in Osaka)
There is so much to say, I'm almost left speechless. The references are a stretch, the artificial city concept in such a historical part of the world is disturbing (Dubai has only had a substantial populations since the 1980's), the "greeness" of this project is a joke and this sentence sort of makes me giggle;
"Activity centers shall be housed in the heart of the geodesic dome of each hill—easy to access with cable cars and through the rapid transportation grid. These centers offer Education, Entertainment, Health and Sport centers as well as Business Districts."
I can hear the soothing voice piping out of a loudspeaker system addressing all of its citizens...
As soon as I saw the drawing I thought there is no way that The Prime Sinister..
uups sorry Minister and his blind followers would go with this desing. I am sure they would find it too pornographic! Sinful at best...
If the architecture adds a mosque on top of each boobs maybe they let him him dance for a while...
The main objective in the PM's mind is to get votes of the people that lives in near by of the proposed shores of the canal and to create lots of pelf for his rapacious friends and relatives...
Orhan putted nicely when he quoted the architecture:
It is all Allah's imagination... yabadaba dooo!
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