Project Description

The project is a series of six miniature drawings of the city of Istanbul, broken up into three sets: the present, the past and the future. The purpose of the drawings was to understand the art of the miniature, and to experiment with surface, depth and the layering of space and time.

The first drawing demonstrates the present experience of the city. An illustration of Istanbul through the perspective of the spiritual substance of light, and how it animates the city.

The second two drawings are a set, based on a past perspective of the city from the point of view of a historical figure: Ara Guler. The drawings illustrate the collision of the traditional everyday life, ruins from the past and the rapidly transforming urban future.

The third set, a tryptic is set far in the future. The drawings depict ruins of Istanbul’s Mosques, distant, and forgotten from the city’s fabric. In a divine unity with nature, the structure, a holy weaving of space and matter, becomes sacred in its very emptiness. The architecture begins to unravel, and the drawings slowly become impossibly fractal, revealing the soul within the architectural flesh.