AURA Istanbul Research,VOL I. Cini/Tile In The 21st Century

Project Creation & Lecture 

AURA Istanbul and Openact Architecture (Madrid), 2022 

Project: Tile in the 21st Century

“Tile: In local and foreign sources, it is the name of Turkish wall ceramics used to decorate walls with one glazed face, usually decorated, and made by grinding and combining high amounts of natural materials such as quartz, clay, frit and kaolin into a paste. In Ottoman sources, wall ceramics are also called “kaşi”. The word “kaşi” takes its name from the Iranian city of Kashan, and in Persian, this word means wall tile. The term “tile” is a word that has settled in literature with the appreciation of Chinese porcelains that reached the Ottoman palace in various ways at the end of the 15th century and in the 16th century, meaning “belonging to China.”

The focus of the study is to conduct research on how tiles, which we encounter with certain stylistic repetitions today, can be conveyed with today’s values ​​and technologies in a narrative that belongs to today. Our aim is to take the semi-stylized tile style of the Classical Ottoman Period of the 16th-17th century as a basis and to develop a style based on human interaction and technology; In this context, the aim is to create a public space installation that creates a link between the symbolic metabolic relations of the present and the past.