RICHARD FENTON

R E S I S T A N C E
M e d i a - L a b  I s t a n b u l

This project considers design and programmatic strategies that resist the eradication of industry-based production in Karakoy, Istanbul. It situates itself on a site of found‘remnants’-and considers in its generative strategy, the connection with the Golden Horn, the traces and scars of abandoned and demolished workshops on the site, as well as the infrastructural language of nearby naval yards. It questions and speculates against the emerging trend of technological production to slowly shift to the outer city limits, abandoning the historic tissue of the city. The project envisages an advanced productive landscape in the form of a Media-Lab; the principle role of which is to form and develop resistant design strategies and proposals to counter this pattern. The environment is derived from future technological potentials, taking the human body as the fundamental subject and scale through which the investigation is based. Engaging with these themes, the architectural and design methodology deployed moves between experiment and more measured means. Similarly, the material language is based on ‘found’ pieces of post-industrial metals to more precisely engineered technological interfaces influencing the overall architectural assemblage.