PoMi Catalogue: 'Towards a Gentrified Architecture'
Pomi (Potential Architecture Studio) is a studio class that has been run in the Department of Architecture of Osmangazi University in Eskişehir since 2002. The studio process adopted in Pomi is predominantly based on the struggle between collectivist and individual creativity. When the priority of the collective is to create and structure a pool of materials, it gets into a process of conceptual dissolution based on the swift destruction of this pool.
Pomi’s idea of creating a city catalogue as the subject of this exhibition stems from debates in a previous phase concerning the heritage of modern architecture arising from the desire to demolish the Kılıçoğlu Cinema and Apartment in Eskişehir. In terms of modern architectural heritage, Eskişehir is a city with a considerable wealth of materials. For an urban studio project even the most basic approach of wandering from street to street taking photographs can be a contribution to feeling one’s way to making a simple documentation of these buildings. When you start finding buildings that are candidates for sharing the fate of Kılıçoğlu Cinema, you realise that the worst thing that can happen to a building is not its demolition. When you consider in particular the urban transformation shenanigans of recent years in Turkey, it seems like the right time has come to make a study in black humour and the maxim 'There is such a thing as worse than bad' takes on a bitter irony. Should the Kılıçoğlu Cinema ever be demolished and some such thing as a run-of-the-mill shopping centre be put in its place, then it has become possible to impose an idea just like Cyrano embarking on his nose tirade, "Young blade! That was a trifle short! You might have said at least a hundred things".
Countless objects to gaze upon can be found in the city. But on the other hand, it is evident that an abundant number of kitsch buildings and kitsch urban objects have accumulated in Eskişehir over the last few years. The collective process took the form of photographing everything that could be catalogue material in the city over a period of a month and translating these objects into the language of drawings. The ten students of the studio created a pool of drawings consisting of 2,000 objects by photographing everything from people to banks, bus stops to buildings and bridges. It can be said that a kind of ethnographic library has been produced. To these have been added anonymous objects taken from more than a hundred building catalogues, flyers, advertisements and magazines. Then, by turning the ready design work into a ‘chimera’ , the ‘gentrified’ city monsters of the future start to emerge. As the organisation is by subject matter rather than by author, the result is the production of a new catalogue from existing heterogeneous elements. The main subject headings of the catalogue are inner spaces, state, genetics, residence, social, sport, memorial, public places and Eskişehir.
*"Chimera" or dragon. A being having the head, body and tail of different animals. If we adapt this to architectural design, we will obtain mutant objects.
**the text is taken from an article that was published in "Arredamento Mimarlık" in March 2008
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The Pomi Catalogue
The Pomi catalogue is set in the 22nd century. It has the nature of a key to the world of nation states that have not yet been invented, but which will be invented in the near future by being established from scratch. It differs from a supermarket where everything you see on the shelves is for sale in that everythin...
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Interiors
In the 22nd century, the president of one of the newly founded states will get out of a jet sent by Pomi and choose the country he wants and be able to buy everything in it for the candidate; the people, the animals, the buildings, and everything he can think of, or even the things he can’t think of. The catalogue a...
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The State
It can not really be said that we are strangers to the ‘good tidings’ in the pages of Pomi’s Gentrified Architecture (!) The advertisers can run amok with their sales formulae in these pages. Absolute views have become commonplace here. Authoritarianism smiles with insolence and makes its eugenic promises. It openly...
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Genetics, society and production
What is attempted to be shown in the Pomi catalogue when the eclecticism in Durand’s Précis is taken into consideration corresponds nevertheless to a tradition that is by no means foreign to us. The Pomi catalogue is of course a version of Durand with ulterior motives, a kind of demented rambling in the vein of Sout...
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Housing and sports areas
Genteel Architects in Absolutely Gentrified Countries of the Next Century according to the Pomi Catalogue
The future world Pomi depicts is full of somewhat dark notifications. We encounter such notifications or conceptions in the pages of the catalogue:
Violence, imposition, traditionalism, genetic projects, ...
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