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Ferda Kolatan is a founding director of SU11 Architecture + Design, an internationally recognized design firm operating out of New York City, and an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Weitzman School of Design University of Pennsylvania.

Hammam

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“Hammam” belongs to a design exploration that derives spatial objects from 16th century Ottoman miniature art. This art form often depicts architecture as an array of fields and frames that collapse the pictorial and the spatial into a single plane. As a result, background and foreground, buildings and human figures, plant life and animals, pattern, color, and text all merge in unexpected and surprising ways. In contrast to the western painting tradition of the same period, the Ottoman miniature does not privilege a naturalist, anthropocentric point of view but rather one that allows for strange juxtapositions, evoking possibilities of novel material collaborations and narrative fictions in architecture. Hammam (Turkish Bath) is based on an Ottoman miniature painting from 1590 depicting the Persian poet Rumi in a bathhouse. The digital object in the exhibition re-constructs this flat image as a complex three-dimensional space where the typical qualities of the miniature, its play with contradictions and simultaneities, become architecture.

 

Click on the Object; Use your mouse, and arrow keys (or WASD keys) + Space bar to make a drawing! Visit the web-based app linked above, to create and save the drawings.
To save the image files, click on the exhibition logo.

Team Members: Ferda Kolatan in collaboration with Caleb Ehly

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