[F. Yorgancıoğlu]

I first met Kaya in 1967, 36 years ago, in Baltimore, Maryland in the United States. We were two seventeen year olds, just waking up to an anti-establishment youth movement that was to change the world. We both wanted to study Architecture and ended up, together, at the University of Maryland School of Architecture near Washington, D.C.

The School of Architecture was a newly established department then, having only one graduating class in front of us. Charles W.Moore was the main driving force.Both the teaching staff and the student body were made of energetic groups of radical hippies as well as good doses of local conservatives. The school was definitely not in the Ivy League where then current theories of architecture were being battled out. Kaya and I managed to be amony the best in our class.

Kaya wanted to expand his visions of Urban Design and Architecture at CORNELL Graduate School. He wanted to work with then widely influential urbanist and historian Colin Rowe. The school was more focused on formal aspects of architecture and urban design in the Modern Classic sense. Form was the organising element in teachings, and the philosophy was “form centered”. I followed Charles Moore to YALE and worked with Vincent Scully, the historian, and architects like James Stirling and Hans Hollein.The approach at YALE was more pluralistic and inclusive. The philosophy was more experiential and “human centered”.

Even though Kaya and I were coming from two seemingly different teachings, our search, always, was for the delights of space experienced in time. We studied with prominent architectural and urban form givers of their times.

Kaya’s underlying interset and approach in his art has been the 1920’s modern thought and the International Style. In his work, form, function, expression of inner functions on the exterior of the structure, honest expression of structure, honesty in form and the use of materials, economy and minimum waste, and professional edict are paramount. In urban situations, existing forces and conditions guide his artistic sensibilities while sculpting form and space. Kaya has a more regimented and less tolerant character than I do which make him more frustrated with disfunctioning and unsympathetic surroundings especially when it comes to artistic creativity. I have a tendency to be more flexible and accepting. I think of myself more as a “mid-wife” where I start a creative process and then let it develop by perceived nature rather than by force or superimposed will.

Kaya and I, however, have been quite compatible and complimentary in many ways, because of our tradition of respect for each other’s logic and approach. We always had room for our common as well as disparate views in our discourse. One’s capability always complimented and completed the other’s strength and vice versa. Our winning competition entry for “The Revitalisation of the City of Samarkand” in Uzbekistan is a very good example of this collaborative process. My work is malleable and leisurely. I do not think of a “Faruk” style per se. For me, every project has its own life. There is definitely a “Kaya” style. I know it when I see it. Such difference in approach to creativity also comes from upbringing. Kaya’s father, İlhan Arıkoğlu, was an engineer as well as an architect. He was a stern man. His mother, Nezahat Arıkoğlu, was an architect trained in the traditions of Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts when the German influence of modernity was at its highest. Kaya’s temperament is more formal and more wilful. He is not afraid of drawing determined, impressionable but very sensitive lines on paper. My temperament is softer, more amenable. Surrounding forces act more directly on what I do. My contextualism is more complex and has a lot bends. My father, also, was at the İstanbul Academy of Fine Arts, drawing and sculpting. He never finished his studies at the Academy due to serious differences between his and his most beloved professor’s approaches to life. He later became a furniture designer and contractor. My mother is a costume designer with much flair. I grew up on my father’s shoulder watching his painterly charcoal and pastel strokes on his planchette. While Kaya’s mother was a painter also, Kaya grew up watching his parents in a relatively modern architectural environment discussing 1920’s Modernism.

We are both artists with somewhat differing sensibilities, approaches and statements, but we come from a common dual-cultured experience. Common to us both is the concern with delightful daily experience of the human mind and body within the everyday spaces that we create. Our works are not sensational and do not seek stardom. Both our works are thought of within a long thern approach; and it is the actual built object or environment that we seek, not just its graphic representation on paper. Graphic representation is a means to us and not an end. We both believe that our hands’ agility and their connections to our minds’ eyes can rarely be matched by computer technology. The “feel of the hand” is different for us. As urban designers, we do not believe in superimposing a totally foreign idea, concept, form, or a way of life onto an existing, living environment or organism’s nature, history, organic growth and its deep meaning and try and give it support to sustain and develop its growth in the healthiest way possible.

Kaya has been living and practising his art in Turkey for some time now where certain priorities have been quite different than the ones he had originally set out for himself. Logic works differently in Turkey; planning is short term, not long term. Quick results and gains and especially the need for showing of them are more prevalent than the needs for long term sustainable growth and gains built upon sound foundations. Kaya’s source of frustration and difficulty in an environment such as in Turkey is the scarcity of such sustainable, healthy, living urban environments or organisms to be working within since most of what existed until as late as the 1950’s have been wiped out in very large measures or have been superimposed on in every form and manner possible. There is little left to work with in urban conditions to strengthen, make healthier, pleasing and livable. Gentrification of what is left is still to come.

The concept of three dimensional urban design in public domain is practically non-existent in Turkey. Socioeconomic forces push most substantial development projects to the outskirts of urban centers; so for most architects, artists, developers, and well-to-do lay people, “escape” to walled-in private domain becomes the norm. Everyday life for the public remains largely in ill-planned, incomprehensible, chaotic environments. Bulldozing flat and creating something new and different for the market place is supported by poor, deficient policies and planning practices in Turkey as in many other developing countries. Billboards take over literally as well as in the shape of buildings. Oceans of nondescript virtual wastelands of supposed urban growth and urban life leave very little room for the concerns of higher levels of humanity, let alone any concerns for “high art”. What good there is in limited quantities in established urban centers slowly give way to commercial pressures, and what is being built new generally make no sense vis-a-vis any formal continuum and have no comprehension as a whole except as one very fast growing “wasteland”.

So, what is an architect or an urban designer to do? In image conscious market driven professional, political and corporate environments where early 20th Century’s bankrupt Corbusiean “tower in the park” planning concept is still the prevailing philosophical thought, there is no chance of “reweaving the broken fabric” as part of public policy. Examples of “fabric” are seen only in isolated private domains mostly to feed the hunger for nostalgia. The effort is usually stopped at the “security wall or fence” smack on the private property line and outside the wall still continues to be the inevitable garbage dump that is owned by no one and cared for by no one.

Such is the main source of frustration for Kaya, the urban designer, where the continuum in the urban fabric, in the time and space relationships, in the everyday experience of delight for the human mind and body are non existent except in the yet untouched urban centers or in the open landscapes where the human hand and its indiscriminate visual, atmospheric and noise generating interventions have not yet been able to reach. Lack of supporting public policy, existing central government sponsored uninformed official planning and architectural practices, public funding focused more on planning for commercial vehicles and automobiles rather than pedestrians, etc. push the able architect to side with remain in isolated private enclaves.

Another source of frustration for Kaya, now the architect practising in modern Turkey, is the scarcity of a healthy critical environment for positive, nurturing creative support. Such support is so far down the list of priorities among professionals that any appreciation for the artist’s effort for high art is quickly lost to the dark realities of common everyday life and struggle for survival.

It is curious that after a 36 year stint in the United States, I am now planning to join Kaya in Turkey, although in different geographic locations, and the discourse continues.