ISTANBUL, TURKEY Manual of Instructions

Can we think of triviality of sense — a quotidianness, a banality, not as the dull opposite of scintillation, but as the grandeur of the simplicity in which sense exceeds itself?” Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World (1997)
Manual of Instructions is a project that speculates on the mundane and banal aspects of large-scale construction. Focusing on various large-scale projects in Istanbul that are currently in design or construction phases, or complete, the project sets a dialogue between environmental imaginations of the large-scale and the quotidian day-to-day workings of architecture and construction. By juxtaposing the planetary and the quotidian, the foreground and the background as well as the construction and the finish, the project speculates on the bureaucracy and procedures of architectural work and labor. Through the presentation of drawings and models, the exhibition space itself becomes a construction site and a place to prompt a discourse around architecture’s own making, assembly and unmaking as performance.