EXTRATERRITORIAL-BOUND

2010

MArch Thesis, Rice University School of Architecture

Advisors: Neyran Turan, Eva Franch

Extraterritoriality, the state of exception from local jurisdiction, is not yet formally manifest as an urban architectural problem. Bound by vertical walls and political geometries within island typologies such as airports, embassies, and free trade zones, current modes of architectural extraterritoriality are founded upon a disconnection from the city.

The ExtraTerritorial Typology is an urban architecture that reconfigures the boundary conditions between territorial grounds and user groups: displaced populations and local citizens. Mediating between global and local scales, the ETT relates to its urban context despite its bigness. The ETT demarcates its non-vertical boundary in relationship to the existing ground by strategically connecting to and detaching from the site topography. Above/below/askew take precedent over the conventional interior/exterior dichotomy.

The ETT accommodates a spectrum of multiscalar international programs within venues of emplacement and displacement dispersed in topographical bands across the site. As an urban scale site intervention, the project is a megaplane which interacts with the existing ground. Sometimes a surface condition, sometimes as megaobject, it is perceived from the street as a shifting architectural form. it extends from the urban context to accommodate programmatic spaces of individuation and collectivity, from transit to asylum, from privatized medical treatment to public athletic stadia.

The test site for insertion of the ETT is in Istanbul, at the emergence of the intercontinental subway connection between the Asian and European sides of the global city. A temporary destination for tourists and travellers, the city also is the inadvertent detention zone for thousands of transit refugees and asylum seekers. The extraterritorial typology intermingles these formerly disparate groups with the local public in an international collective of the megaplane.