Earlier this month, the installation Sky Spotting Stop had been chosen as the first-ever YAP Istanbul Modern winner in conjunction with the Young Architects Programs at MoMA PS1 in New York, MAXXI in Rome and the cultural organization CONSTRUCTO in Santiago, Chile.

Here is now also one of the five YAP Istanbul Modern finalist entries: Tearing the Ground by young Ankara-based firm, ONZ Architects. — bustler.net

With the winners of the New York and Rome editions of the Young Architects Program (YAP) already unveiled, the first-ever YAP Istanbul Modern winner has now also been selected: the temporary installation Sky Spotting Stop by young design firm SO? Architecture and Ideas reached the highest score with the jury and will be built in early June in Istanbul Modern’s courtyard. — bustler.net

"The new album narrates urban life. It is rather personal music, bound up with this city, there are images of an asphalt jungle and a house that is being built in a city, and we always support the ones who don't have power." -Baba Zula — Qantara.de

The larger irony is that in calling for a huge new mosque in the tradition of Sinan, Erdoğan may be missing the more fundamental lesson of the Ottoman architect’s work. As Bruno Taut, the German architect who emigrated to Turkey to flee the Nazis, argued, Sinan was himself a proto-modernist whose ability to create extraordinary beauty from novel engineering had more in common with twentieth-century German functionalism than earlier Islamic architecture. — The New York Review of Books

Sinan was “the Euclid of his day,” said Dogan Kuban, author of more than 70 books on Islamic architecture. “At St. Peter’s in Rome, your eye is drawn to the dome itself,” he said in a recent conversation. “Sinan’s shallow domes, however, with their abstract painted decoration, seem to magically float overhead. Instead of the structure, you contemplate the space.” — NYT

In the international design competition for Yenikapı Transfer Point and Archaeo-Park Area in Istanbul, Turkey, three First Prizes have been announced this week. The jury selected the top project teams Eisenmann Architects/Aytaç Architects, Atelye 70/Francesco Cellini/Insula Architettura E Ingegneria, and Cafer Bozkurt Architects/Mecanoo Architects from nine shortlisted teams, including MVRDV and other international firms. — bustler.net

Even though Özcan’s photographs do not contain a single human figure, we cannot talk about the absence of the subject. All these images are stamped by the shadow of the subject who has temporarily or permanently left. -Özgür Özakın — Istanbul Fading

Istanbul’s evocative skyline is set to be capped by a new peak, as architects on Wednesday unveiled plans to build a tower almost 300 meters high, which will rival the highest buildings in Europe.

Scotland-based architectural firm RMJM’s office in Dubai said that it received planning approval for “Metropol Istanbul,” a vast 500,000 square meter project, which includes three towers, a 30,000 square meter public shopping mall, offices and luxury apartments. — blogs.wsj.com

Games gurus and architects have much in common: both design the movement of people through space. Assassin's Creed: Revelations, set in 16th-century Constantinople, writes that similarity large.

To furnish the video-game's levels with verisimilitude, art director Raphael Lacoste and mission design director Falko Poiker turned draftsmen. They made a research trip to the city (today's Istanbul) to collect images that could be turned into computer graphics. — wired.co.uk

Architects in 2009 described Istanbul’s downtown neighborhood of Tarlabaşı as an unsafe place for children -- a district whose destruction and reconstruction would be in the interest of its residents.
Few dispute that Tarlabaşı is run-down and that many of its residents live below the poverty line. But the congested neighborhood is also one of the few remaining places in the city center where there is affordable housing for the urban poor. — eurasianet.org

Panaroma is a public art which criticize the lack of public space and the confused function of the few open/green spaces in İstanbul.
Art Project by Andreas Fogarasi. Project architect & construction supervision by Alper Derinboğaz. — Salon2