From now on we will be study the Dikmen Valley for our final project. We had a few trip to the site and experienced the area in order to analyse its topography, its social context and in-between conditions it creates.
We were expected to design a package for 5 glasses for our Structure course. The package should provide economic storage options and at the same time be used as a container to carry and transport the products. Here is the poster of my proposal.
The first jury of the second year studio has gone so well. Here is my final proposal: model, drawings and the poster.
More than 4000 years ago, the story begins with the village life of farming and animal husbandry, in the highlands above the Nile Valley. With especially the influence of their religion and believes, there was created one of the most significant structures in the history of architecture.
My great admiration for Egyptian monuments and spending some time there definitely forced me choose that topic from the book ”A History of Architecture” by Spiro Kostof. From now on I will be focused on this by studying both this text and further readings, finally at the end of semester we are required to write a term-paper about the particular point we picked in this topic.
Until the recorded history, Egypt governed and ruled separately: as Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. Then, King Menes of the Upper Egypt invaded the north and unified the country; which is a significant event for the people of the region and hence creates a great improvement on the Egyptian architecture. So the actual monumental architectural pieces in Egypt, comes after this political and social chaos. The country developed a unique articulate stone architecture: such as the great examples of Saqqara and Giza. It can also be named as monumental temple architecture, since most of the structures constructed for worship and commemorate the pharaoh.
Egyptian people has very unique believes about death; for them, death means being born again. They believe one’s tomb must be like one’s house, in both literal and figurative way. The tomb should provide the direct imitation of the buried person’s possessions, needs and wants. Therefore, as a high culture, Egypt was obsessed with the preservation and provisioning of the dead body. Each and every funerary architectural structure was motivated by the belief that if the material needs of the corpse are supplied, it could continue to function normally forever. And no corpse was more privileged than that of the god-king: the royal tomb.
At Saqqara the royal tombs were more complicated. It’s a huge and high rectangular structure, has a subsidiary rooms for holding the owner’s possessions. And the layout of the tomb has the exact shape of the actual palace of the king. The king was considered buried under the floor of his house. As the time goes by, the features of these early dynastic tombs are changed. Later on they put a small mortuary temple and a wooden boat to carry pharaoh across the heavens and accompany the sun-god Re.
The exterior order of the complex is also well-designed. It has only one real entrance at the southeast corner of the enclosure. It leads into a long corridor with half coloumn-half wall elements, carries a stone ceiling. This ceiling has slits on the particular positions, which can be considered as the earliest known case of clerestory lighting. This corridor opens to a large court contains a solid wall, used for hiding the secondary tomb which contains the burial place of the king’s entrails, which were customarily removed from the corpse before the mummification.
In Egypt, most of the structures, tombs, walls made out of stone. Therefore the first interpretation of brick, timber and plant forms of the Egyptian Architecture has done in the hard medium of Tura Limestone.
And the most distinctive feature of the monuments, structures or generally the Egyptian Architecture is being orthogonal; with straight lines and paths. Basically, everything was linked by the Nile axis, which was the major highway of the country. Things ran along the Nile River, mostly at right angles to it. It has a very sophisticated orthogonal planning that, curved walls or circular building are almost unknown in the ancient architecture of Egypt. Geometric master plans are unique to Egypt at this early date.
Melis Kucuktunc 