Proto-Habitat won the first place in the Skyscraper of the Future competition held at AURA Istanbul.
Cities experience transformation through globalization. Business oriented spaces like skyscrapers turn into spaces of global consumption where in which the user experience is highly disregarded. This drastic ambition to create spaces for international/financial centres brings forth an image of a skyscraper as serious, somewhat humourless areas while the everyday users of such spaces are molded into the banality of the larger context they are situated in.
The lack of humour is the main motivation of proto-habitat to destroy the aforementioned seriousness and reconstruct the very concept of the skyscraper to become spaces of play, mobility and self-sufficiency. In order to offer a new way of day-to-day life, the new place of living and working develops both vertical and horizontally through a modular system.
The play concept derives from New Babylon coined by Constant Nieuwenhuys. Through the complete automation of labour, the new species called Homo-Luden generated in New Babylon evolve into a kind that prioritizes play. Further, Homo Ludens portray and design their personalized spaces through modularity, while rejecting stability and permanency.
Within such variability and ephemerality, Homo Ludens just like the spaces they inhabit, constantly evolve, and embrace freedom, constant change and evanescence.
Proto-habitat consists of public spaces accompanied by private modules that can be added or extracted freely. The entire structure consists of four main programs; green spaces, public spaces, the mobile residence and the amphitheatre.
Public spaces contain movie theatres, libraries, reading areas and spaces for creative production.
Green spaces form its own flora and fauna with the public input and contain areas for sports and recreation.
The movable capsules (residences) are spaces for living. It is anticipated that these mobile residential areas are in favour to break the boundaries of stationary living standard and instead encourage nomadic life style.
The amphitheatre is a place for assembly. It manifests togetherness and communal living by offering public space open to anyone that happens to stumble upon it.
