Mending Wall
Personal Info
Name: Ekin BASKENTLI
Nationality: Turkish
Institution / Company: KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture
Instagram: ekinbaskentli
Facebook: Ekin Başkentli
-FINALIST of Non Architecture Award 2022 Competition | Category: Urban & Landscape
Mending Wall (Documenting as an act of maintenance: Maintaining the border wall of Divided Nicosia)
Since 1974, the island of Cyprus has been de facto divided along a UN-administered buffer zone, separating the space into distinct political and physical environments. At the core of this division sits the divided capital, Nicosia. Within the historic urban fabric, this border manifests as a highly restricted buffer zone bounded by fortified architectural edges, barricades, and closed streetscapes constantly monitored by UN peacekeepers. While photographing active military checkpoints is restricted, comprehensive spatial documentation of this environment remains vital yet fragmented.
The project documents these physical boundary conditions from the northern perspective. Due to regional travel and entry regulations, crossing to the southern part of the city was restricted during the timeframe of the study. Therefore, this documentation focuses on North Nicosia, operating as a foundational analysis with the intention that future collaborative research can document the southern edge to form a unified architectural record of the city. While living along a militarized perimeter introduces precarity, residents continuously navigate and inhabit this unique spatial condition. This reality prompts a critical architectural inquiry: if the immediate removal of this partition is not possible, how can architecture maintain and improve the quality of daily life along its edge?
The research starts with the question: Could architecture be understood as the practice of guardianship of the negative environment? It sets out to find the value of the militarized urban edge as an architectural threshold and to transform the space by documenting. It ends with a drawing (Hope) of the first research finding on-site, which shows a rare point of shared institutional consensus. While the two sides do not share a unified map of Nicosia above-ground, the master plan of the city’s shared sewerage network is one that both parties jointly approve and manage. Above ground, Nicosia is physically partitioned by historical and political barriers, but underneath, the city’s infrastructure remains unified.
Project Type:
Master Thesis
Jury Comments
– Karoline Liedtke-Sørensen
to use maintanance to convert a former political and precarious element of a city into something to live around and to transform the space by documenting it is extremly valuable , the methods of documentation like photographes paired with drawings and models are beautiful excecuted and arranged and give a vivid impression of the wall in the everyday live of the citizens
