VitrA Çağdaş Mimarlık Dizisi - Arkitera

Intended as a park that houses a collection of 1/25 scale models of selected buildings
from all around Turkey, the Minicity Park has emerged as a genuine product that
eschews the pompous nobility of higher cultural fields and instead encourages the
consumption of symbols and images. The major element of the design is the conflict
between openness and closure generated by the investor’s wish that the park draw
the attention of consumer tourists but the models should not be seen from the outside.
The interface at the south, which separates the park from the public space, has been
transformed into a series of shells that function as shelters. Terrace slits on the rear
face of these shells provide visual transparency. On the other hand, the western arm
of the mass has been designed as a much calmer dividing strip that is detached from
the ground.
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Theme parks in general simplify facts, flatten the deep multi-layered structure of history
to reduce it into images of objects, compress knowledge into ready-made images
and information labels and focus on effects, strategies and forms of presentation rather
than content. Accepting the impossibility of having a genuinely authentic experience
within this simulated reality that demands to be rapidly consumed, Minicity Model Park
has been conceptualized based on a sharp distinction between daily life and fiction,
and designed to emphasize this duality and construct this border. A reinforced concrete
wall forms the background for the artificial topography in front of it, dividing the building
in two and separating the worlds of reality and representation. This is the leading
component of the design concept as an interface. As the L-formed building surrounds
the open space where the models are exhibited, the two faces of this interface wall
have been constructed with contrasting approaches. The surface of the wall facing the
city, daily life and reality has a more abstract and metaphoric response, with stone clad
massive artificial topography that aims to multiply and reproduce the hill that the wall
leans on. In contrast, the inner side of the interface overlooking the artificial and surreal
world consists of wooden deck terraces and pergolas designed with rational forms in
an orthogonal arrangement.
This design structure detaches the visitors from the rush of daily life and all sorts of
mental activities, preparing them for the imaginary world through the experience of a
series of concentration mechanisms from open to closed space, from light to darkness
and from the ground to the upper level. As the bewildered guests reach the wooden
deck and encounter the compiled wonders of the “Liliput” world and their travel routes
at once, they are directed towards a surreal world where geography loses its validity.
Considering the successive spatial sequences that it aims to create, Minicity Model Park
can easily be evaluated as one of the most consciousness-expanding works designed
recently, with its intelligent critical approach and striking cinematic expression.
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