By James Melsom

The research project implements a curated stroll through the city - the tool of the flâneur - to capture a specific moment in the evolution of the ancient city of Istanbul - demonstrated in a fragment of its urban and cultural centre.

The city of Istanbul has gone through sweeping urban change in the last decade. Nowhere is this clearer than the Beyoğlu district, especially the İstiklal Avenue and the network of alleys in its surroundings. The change certainly has physical aspects, with certain key buildings being replaced or extensively renovated, but chiefly programmatic, with a continuous transformation of occupancy and signage, including the language used. A fundamental shift in identity can be seen to take place.

At the turn of the 20th century, photographers such as Eugène Atget successfully captured this moment of transition in Paris, in surreal images that have immortalized a key moment in the evolution of the great city.

This intense focus on the surface of the city can also be seen in the early photography of Ara Güler of the city of Istanbul, and others. These images inspired a closer investigation of the strolling gaze of the flâneur, the technical act of scanning, and the potential for their combination.

LANDSKIP Lab was pleased to be invited to exhibit in the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial with their research, Flâneur Scanner - a remote sensing scan and audio recording project of the streets of Istanbul.

The exhibition consisted of a video installation that demonstrate the process and atmospheric manipulations of the surface of the city. This data was collected on site by a local pedestrian, with instructions and equipment prepared and processed remotely in the LANDSKIP Lab workshop in Basel, Switzerland.

The resulting model captured large-scale fragments of the Beyoğlu district, the qualities of which were influenced by the movement patterns of the pedestrian, proximity to the facades, movement of passers-by and vehicles, and the quality of light.

The blurred, atmospheric scan results were then animated with slow transitions, which further embodied the act of the strolling flâneur. The motion was combined with spatial sound clips of the İstiklal streets to further enhance the sensation of the flâneur, touring a frozen moment of a scanned city in a constant process of evolution.

Sensing the Fading Cinemas of Istanbul

During the biennial, James Melsom of LANDSKIP Lab was flown to Istanbul for a subsequent 3 day workshop focused on a phenomenon detected in the İstiklal Street in the Beyoğlu district - the gradual erasure of its famous local cinemas. The locations of 24 cinemas were discovered during the on-site research, most of which have disappeared in the last decade. The Akbank Sanat on the İstiklal, location of the exhibition and workshop, is two doors down from one of the cinema sites studied.

The video summary demonstrates the process, research and the results of the intense workshop, as well as a fictional and multi-scalar assembly of some of the photogrammetry data acquired. The simultaneous fascination and memorialisation of these sites lead to experiments in scanning, re-assembly and late-night projection of the city surface back onto its own darkened facades.

The results of the exhibition research and workshop were presented at an invited lecture at the Istanbul Technical University, as well as a visit the impressive active construction site of the massive Istanbul City Museum with Alper Derinboğaz, founder of Salon Architects, for a landscape survey.

Many thanks to the organisation of the 4IDB, the İKSV, and the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia for travel and exhibition costs.