Istanbul gets a 3rd Bosporus Bridge, connecting the European and Asian side. The construction is still in process but anyway had its first civilian visitors lately: Two extreme climbers clambered up the construction cranes and offered us a breath-taking view over the bridge – a view, the world’s public won’t even see after the bridge’s opening for public transportation.

Once the dominant style of İstanbul’s housing, the traditional wooden buildings are more and more vanishing from the city landscape: Untill the middle of the 20th century wood – due to its cheap supply – was the mainly used material in construction. Devastating fires that haunted the city at the turning of the 20th century lead the government to forbid further construction in wood. Although experts argue that the closeness of the houses and not the material was the cause of the fire’s violence, wooden construction was abandoned. Starting from the 1920s foreign minorities who represented the majority of the craftsmen started to leave Turkey, taking the knowledge of the craft with them. Modernist aspirations of the turkish population that favoured european style housing in concrete furthered this development. A whole architectural type and with it artcrafts that dates back untill the 16th century is slowly erased.

Book Launch and Exhibition – the upcoming artist in residency from Berlin in Istanbul will have a book launch and exhibition in Berlin, February 19th 2015, 7 pm at Revolver Publishing Immanuelkirchstraße 12, Berlin. Katja Pratschke together with her husband, the filmmaker and artist Gusztáv Hámos will be in Istanbul starting in March 2015:

The exhibition Sample Cities / Imaginary Spaces deals with the theme of personal urban perceptions, which we call »the city«. The city, as a living organism, reflects social processes and interactions, economic relations, political conditions and private matters. In the city, human memories, desires and tragedies find expression in the form of designations and marks engraved in house walls and paving slabs. The Sample Cities/ imaginary spaces project researches what is contained or concealed in the city under this layer of signs.