Tan Oral: Essays of an Architect
"My training as an architect coincided with a social awakening in the country. And as I gradually became aware of the accepted order my anger turned somewhat on architectural training itself. I felt that this type of architectural training was not all in accord with the needs of the country! But, while I continued in this way, school came to an end. After working for three years as an assistant in building sciences and vocational studies I went off on my military service. And came back. I came back, but I wasn't taken back into my previous job. The support I had voiced for student participation in the school administration and my activities in this sphere had never been viewed with approval and had never been forgiven. And yet the Academy, the only school of higher education in which the students participated in the administration, might be said to have been the education institution least affected by the catastrophe of March 12.
I found favour neither with the administration of the country nor with the administration of the Academy. Neither was I accepted back into my educational post nor could I find what I had expected from my profession. (…) Finding the extent of the changes too much for both myself and my strength, what could I do? I began to sketch what was going on within me and through my head. Actually, I had been obliged to take up sketching long before I entered the Academy. As my relations with the girls I was in love with didn't work out as I had dreamed, I began to draw their pictures. And the amazing thing was that as soon as I started showing these pictures things began to mend. And at the same time my self-confidence increased. And I still exploit that confidence today. When my loves don't work out or when I can't deal with what is worrying me I find the best thing is to sit down and draw pictures. That's what you call hope!
It either relieves the pain or increases the pleasure of whatever I may be describing.
, "Yaza Cize", Iris Mizah Kulturu Pub., Istanbul 1998.
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Cities and Us
"It isn't buildings that make cities, it's us. A city is like a living organism. It isn't flawless like a crystal… It's like us, an organism existing with all its flaws. It is therefore a great mistake to regard it as a crystal, as an inanimate object. Cities are organisms like us. Like us, they are continually chan...
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Past, Identity, Confidence
"The mere mention of any object implies that you can declare where and when it existed. Time and place! Two indispensable elements. A person or a society that has lost its coordinates in the universe doesn't know where it stands. If it loses its milestones it loses its sense of time, and together with that it loses ...
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