Merve Sahin

Project Location 
Berlin, Germany 

Topic 
Utopia Formal Experimentation, New Ways of Living 

Program 
Mixed use - Cultural & Social Aggregation, Archives, Parliament, Theatre, Community 

Cultivating Liberated Public Spaces Amid Physical Surveillance 

The project explores how architecture can adapt to the digital age by integrating unsurveilled virtual media into a physical theatre typology. The structure, emerging from a decaying bunker, can serve as a visual and political emblem of transformation, symbolizing how architecture and technology can empower people to engage in new public ways. 

Surveillance technologies enabled control by repressive forces, regulating social interactions and leading to discrimination against marginalized communities. The skin color, gestures, sexual orientation, and protests are recorded in public spaces to be used against the individuals. We trace a flow of intellectuals, including academics, writers, poets, playwrights, artists, and activists from the Middle East to Western capitals. The project challenges architecture to adapt to new civic of digital turn by providing a creative space for these individuals whose lives revolve around producing political commentaries that put them at risk. The goal is to provide physical and digital anonymity. 

All Watched Over is a camouflaged interior as an impulsing artifact of data and images cultivated by the political exiles. The interior readapts the theatre and parliament typology to exchange and circulate visual elements, while the exterior envelope employs material strategies to trick the surveillance gaze to grant digital anonymity. The extension is designed to eliminate borders through fragmentation, continuity, and rotation of elements. The stepped levels of the interior maintain a visual connection to the central void in the form of a theatre, while the extension function as a light-filled translucent 3D field. The interior is lightly covered by the veil of anonymity that blurs and pixelates. The power of the digital age is to be able to be invisible, going off the grid. The veil is doing that by creating a fuzzy appearance of bodies. A type of camouflage, like the bunker. The project consists of two cycles within spaces: data management and theatre. The artists, journalists, and researchers produce together in the debate chambers, while data is transformed into virtual spectacles to meet with the people outside of the seclusion. The theatre is physical, and the medium is virtual. It is a wild electronic data landscape of fiction and stories. The media is safely archived in the servers in the underground bunker. Finally, through the stepped chambers for bodies to relax and debate, and theatre chambers to experience and share, the artifact serves for communal gatherings, living together, and cultivating a digital nature. To wander in this cloud is to encounter different narratives continuously as a shared experience. The field keeps unfolding with surprising moments created by layered transparencies, multiplied focuses, and softly expanded visual field. To sum up, the building becomes an optical and political apparatus inhabited by liberated bodies. It takes hints from the long corridors, rhythms, and densities of the bunker and takes it to the next step by protecting the custom digital nature and as a result, creating intimate landscapes of reflections and playful spectacles.