MICHEAL DALY

S  C  O  P  I  C    V  I  G  I  L

TV Studios for a 24-Hour News Network

Taksim Square, Istanbul, Turkey

This project, which places a TV Studio for a 24-Hour News Network overlooking Taksim Square, seeks to reflect the themes of propaganda, surveillance and control which permeate the site. The structure, which houses the ultimate medium of modern propaganda, maintains a constant vigil over the site of such atrocities as Bloody Sunday and the Taksim Square Massacre. This will ensure that protests and demonstrations, which have always taken place here, are not responded to with such extreme acts of violence in future.

The TV Studio was developed by various scopic readings derived from a blindspot identified in the Square’s near omniscient surveillance network combined with folding, inverting and extruding the ground markings of the adjacent Gezi Park. This generated a number of parti models which resulted in a structure of elongated, inhabited screens which float over a newly formed, sheltered public space connecting the Park to Cumhuriyet Caddesi. The Studios, which use the iconic Square as a backdrop, along with the other programmatic elements housed within the elongated volumes, are enveloped by screens of varying opacity and materiality which reflects the ideological obfuscation practiced by such media outlets.