Oh, Istanbul!! (EN)

It is not easy to write about this immense sprawling urban mass where more than 16 million souls live.

Living and observing it, could be watching the slide of its poor neighborhoods, for dozens and dozens of miles, through a taxi’s damp window, in one of its many rainy nights until your heart shrinks with the solitude of someone lost without a reference point, adrift in the sea. Or it could be, in an opposite manner, that moment of rare synchrony between space and time, in which you find yourself being the transient protagonist of a small part in this millennial scenario, where history resists to stop.

Geography, landscape and orography blend with the sea waters in an amazing game of hide and seek, where the Bosporus and the Golden Horn are its most beautiful proof. One’s eyes cannot rest if seated along its long sinuous shores. Either it’s the huge bridges coming out through the buildings merging into the sea or a small bay, protector of fishing boats, surrounded by dense green Nordic forests. A freight boat, with a loud colored hull, sails the canals waters, blocking the views of the opposite shore and making the ferries and the other boats shrink next to its colossal size.

So many have tried to trap this city’s beauty through painting, photography or music. Maybe the best way to grasp it should be through writing. Nevertheless, given my lack of ability for words, and as an architect, it has been through fast sketches, using a black pen that I have been involving myself with this mistress-like city that Istanbul has become to me.

Nowadays, the photogenic quality of Istanbul’s hilly silhouette, of its watercourses, monuments or its chaotic skyline are always targeted by the short-memoried cellphone quick shot. I am no exception. But I can’t stop thinking that that kind of photography is a way to escape lingering in matters that can make you understand better where you are or with whom one comes across.

Hand sketching has that quality of making you plunge into the depth of field, the textures, the nature of materials, in the whims of the shape. Through eyesight, but mostly through your hands, the brain assimilates the qualities of what our eyes observe. If the moment is right, the concentration in the subject of your drawing can take you to a relaxing mind set, similar to meditation. It brings you to a symbiosis with the wrinkles of the roofs or the folding of a façade.

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While living in Istanbul, I have been mainly concentrated in sketching buildings of the Ottoman period because it seems the best way to comprehend a different architecture from where I come from. After choosing a specific building, I take the subway or get into a taxi, equipped with Prof. Doğan Kuban (Ottoman’s Istanbul) architectural guide. After the first sketch, my walking tour starts, in flâneur mode, on the quest for more buildings to draw.

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These sketches and promenades allowed me to understand that most of the religious buildings from the great Mimar Sinan take reference in the architecture of the byzantine period, but his imagination and wit allowed him to lighten the supporting structures and free the interior space of his many mosques, providing the space with unique lightness and luminosity; or to understand the western styles that contaminate the palace and civil architecture of the Balyan family.

For an architect, there are no few reasons for him to fall in love with the city. The complex manner in which it expands through an amazing natural territory; the richness of its built patrimony, layered as in a geological process, that enables you to read in it an important part of the history of humanity; and of course, the vibrating energy emerging from the thousands of cars, people, birds, cats and other living creatures that buzz in this immense metropolis.

In such a setting, the dazzled architect tries to find the best corner to capture, in his small sketch book, a spark from what emanates from this great city.

(We also recommend reading The Sketch Virus, another post related with Urban Sketching and Architecture).