Dikili, İzmir, Turkey

Yahşibey Design Workshops

Yahşibey Design Workshops #49 team presents ‘realizable’ design proposals for 2 abandoned village schools they developed as part of Yahşibey Design Workshops together with Nevzat Sayın and Herkes İçin Mimarlık Derneği.
Photos: NSMH, Cemal Emden

Designed by NSMH with the collaboration of Emre Senan Design Foundation, Yahşibey Design Workshops provides a provocative atmosphere of creativity for young design students from different disciplines and offers an alternative architecture school. 

Yahşibey Design Workshops defines itself as “an initiative for a modest contribution to the universal design culture”. Each summer, 10 design students around the world are selected for the workshop. During fifteen-day periods of workshops, the students live, cook, and clean together as well as work on the design projects which the masters specify. The workshop program can be considered as an intense time period for thinking, discussing, developing, and expressing issues such as environment, tradition, craftsmanship, locality, sustainability, etc. 

Yahşibey is a small village of Dikili with 116 households and a population of 260, which was founded in 1940. Most of the houses in the village are built with stone. 

The geographical data like the prevailing wind was considered. These data are also important for the design process of NSMH to ensure that the structures are blended into the site and become almost invisible. 

Yahşibey Design Workshops #49 team presents design proposals for 2 abandoned village schools they developed as part of Yahşibey Design Workshops together with Nevzat Sayın and Herkes İçin Mimarlık this year. The village schools had been worked on in previous years but this year, these data are taken into consideration as preliminary research to present ‘realizable’ proposals. The outputs of the workshops can be examined as follows.

The first goal of the project is to revive two schools that were built for the children of the village in the past and to bring the school gardens back. Due to the decrease in mobility of daily life and the increase in the average age, the design priority became the students and the elderly population living in the village. Since the first day, the theme of design has been shaped around socializing, having fun, and returning to the habits of ‘togetherness’ for the village people.

To revive the abandoned buildings called ‘old and new schools in a more ‘feasible’ and ‘embraceable’ way; it is decided to renovate the schools that have been in the memory of the local people with the least intervention. It is decided to reinforce and use most of the existing structures, making additions to the existing structures if the functions were insufficient, and demolish structures such as the toilet building, which have lost their purpose today, or are not in good physical condition. The stone walls of the schools, which have an important role in the village texture, are architectural elements with high potential for the team. To strengthen the broken relationship between the two schools, they create gathering-socializing areas by bringing the garden walls to a curvilinear form in some places and directing them into the garden. 

The new/lower school turned into a “Yahşibey Gastronomy Workshop” as an accommodation unit and kitchen for culinary students. The indoor study area creates space for workshops and at the same time works as a library, where recipes are stored and the slowly disappearing food culture of Yahşibey and the Aegean is documented. The open kitchen, which was created by demolishing the toilet building, turns into a workshop by continuing the building trace. It is a space where culinary students learn the dishes of the region by making the garden products of the region with volunteer chefs and local people. When the students go back to their homes, this kitchen can be used as a gathering area where the local people cook and eat together at events such as charity dinners. 

With the different functions offered to all these places, at any time of the year, local people can use these spaces with their children and grandchildren and regain their diminished habits of being together. Gastronomy students and visitors from outside will interact with the locals through the workshops they will experience and contribute to the preservation of the disappearing food culture of the region. 

The team believes that the transformation of the abandoned schools, which have a place in the collective memory of the villages, will make a significant contribution to the revival of the villages. They hope that this program with the proposal for reviving Yahşibey through food culture can be a model for other villages with adaptations that take into account the conditions of those villages.

Yahşibey Houses
Dikili / İzmir
1998-2007
Construction area: 1100 m2
Site area: 2800 m2
Housing
İbrahim Eyüp, Mert Eyiler, Nevzat Sayın
1 Emre Senan House
2 EkinSenan House
3 NevzatSayınHouse
4 Alev-BihratMavitan House
5 Kerime Arsan House
6 Kemal Aydınlı House
7 Emre Senan Design Foundation

Emre Senan Design Foundation
Dikili / İzmir
2006
Construction area: 250 m2
Site area: 1.000 m2
Education
İbrahim Eyüp, Mert Eyiler, Nevzat Sayın, Onur Eroğuz

Yahşibey House 1

Dikili / İzmir
2004
Construction area: 125 m2
Site area: 162 m2
Housing
Elvan Uluutku, Nevzat Sayın

Yahşibey House 2

Dikili / İzmir
2004
Construction area: 142 m2
Site area: 536 m2
Housing
Elvan Uluutku, Nevzat Sayın

Yahşibey House 3

Dikili / İzmir
1998
Construction area: 155 m2
Site area: 200 m2
Housing
Elvan Uluutku, Nevzat Sayın

Yahşibey House 4

Dikili / İzmir
2004
Construction area: 141 m2
Site area: 392 m2
Housing
İbrahim Eyüp, Mert Eyiler, Nevzat Sayın

Since it is located opposite the 6th house, which was built with a circular wall based on the old garden wall, and there is a corner at the edge of the same turns, this house also has a circular wall and a mezzanine that other houses do not have. Taking advantage of the land structure that bends to the south along the long side of the building, it reaches to a room on the garden floor by descending half a floor from the entrance and a room with a balcony by going up half a floor. This half-floor solution, which is also important in terms of providing privacy between people sharing the same house, is reinforced by the fact that the bedrooms and the common living area face different directions.

Yahşibey Houses 5-6

Dikili / İzmir
2007
Construction area: 295 m2
Site area: 488 m2
Housing
İbrahim Eyüp, Mert Eyiler, Nevzat Sayın

The 5th and 6th houses were designed together to be used from both sides of the same courtyard. These two houses, which are also connected to the gardens of the 1st and 3rd houses, have the same principles as the ones built before, but there is a difference in terms of materials: “Is it a must to build it with stone, why can’t we make it out of bricks and plaster it?” said one of the villagers, so we said why not and wanted to make an example. That’s why on the upper floor of the 6th house the finishing material is plaster inside and outside. This is how plaster was added next to stone and exposed concrete. After being used as two separate houses for a while, we lost our friend who is the owner of the 5th house, and this house is used as a workshop for our artist friends who are the owners of the 6th house.

Emre Senan Design Foundation
Dikili / İzmir
2006
Construction area: 250 m2
Site area: 1.000 m2
Education
İbrahim Eyüp, Mert Eyiler, Nevzat Sayın, Onur Eroğuz

YAHŞİBEY DESIGN WORKSHOPS

Project Leaders: Nevzat Sayın, Altıner Yıldırım, Elif Tan, Emre Gündoğdu, İdil Bayar, Merve Gül Özokcu, Sarp Özgen, Setenay Kamazoğlu

Participants: Andaç Güney, Ateş Cem Sayın, Burak Aydın, Ece Geren, Elif Feyza Ünlüsoy, Emre Özen, Hevjin Andiç, Kevser Aksoy, Kutay Koçtekin, Selman Faruk Agavur

NSMH
Architects
Partner: Emre Senan
NSMH was founded by Nevzat Sayın in 1986 in Kuzguncuk to provide architectural services. It was restructured in 1992 and has a participatory management and executive approach. This participatory understanding forms the basis of an efficient working environment with teams from other architectural groups and disciplines as well as in the office layout.
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