Dominate Architecture

Imagen The City: rolling hills encrusted with ancient edifices, cut through by the Boğazı. One might consider the single most definitive form of architecture there something like this:

There are far more than 1000 mosques in The City; they are ubiquitous. If every resident were to heed the call to prayer at least once a day at such a place, over 3000 people would be in attendance. However, it is nothing so grandiose that forms the warp and weft of this flying carpet- and to take a closer look, we must first go into space:

What imbues the endless sprawl of this Megalopolis with a rose tint are the terracotta tiled rooftops of it's working class apartment buildings, where the working poor and middle-upper class share a life style defined by a standard form shaped of brick and iron. Here is our street:

In these man-made canyons, we are all cliff-dwellers; each with a balcony for drying clothes and shaking carpets, and two layers of curtains- one to foil the casual observer, the other to shut out everyone.

In 1999, a quake measuring 7.5 struck the urban center of Izmit -a city in a country free from the bonds of a building code. Countless tenements such as these fell; if you want a good cry, do a search of YouTube. Here, on the edge of two continental plates, over 10 million live in similar structures. The basic construction method involves a cement and iron skeleton, back filled with terracotta, honeycomb-like bricks:

Often, the building process drags on for years; the owner/builder, eager for revenues, may begin letting apartments before construction is complete. The quality of materials, such as sand for cement or frequency and placement of reinforcement, has only attracted scrutiny since after the Izmit disaster; none the less, I have seen 8 story tall apartment buildings, unfinished, occupied, with no sign of a building crew.

Directly adjacent to a major highway, one such building was (apparently) deemed incapable of supporting the brick backfill at the perimeter, so the builder abandoned 20% of the structure and placed the walls back between the load-bearing members. The outside was left totally unfinished. Here is a local example of a building, years into occupancy, still under construction:

Still, this way of living is not without charm: The City flows organically, domestic and business areas seamless, overlapping. Within two blocks of our residence you will find four wood-fired bakeries, at least as many pastane, or cake shops, over a half-dozen vegetable markets. For those lucky few who need not leave the neighborhood, life is simple. For the rest of us, there is the second great unifier and predominate character trait of this place: traffic.