27/07/2026
“Crafts & Grafts”: Atlas of an Architecture of Additions
Our proposal, shortlisted for the Türkiye Pavilion open call for the 20th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, approaches Türkiye’s built environment not as a collection of finished objects, but through the layers that are added, removed, transformed and reused over time. These interventions are more than everyday modifications: they are traces of an ongoing squabble between buildings and life. While they sometimes respond to necessities such as climate, maintenance, privacy, storage and accessibility, they may also generate new problems concerning structural safety, property, regulation and collective life.
The project examines architectural additions along the axes of necessities and potentialities, bringing together the different responses of users, craftspeople and architects to similar conditions in the form of an atlas. Necessities reveal the frictions between existing buildings and changing social, economic and climatic conditions; potentialities explore alternative forms of addition that can be developed by learning from local knowledge and practices of making. Craft refers to situated knowledge of making, adapting and repairing, while graft describes architectural additions that learn from this knowledge and aim to make buildings more resilient to future crises.
Although our proposal was not selected, we believe that mapping the logics and practices of informal production can make an important contribution to contemporary architectural debate, and we will continue the research in different forms.
We congratulate the team behind “Spolia Futures”, which will be exhibited at the Biennale, and look forward to the discussions they will open up around an architecture of addition.
Ilgın Avcı Alisan Cirakoglu ozguresrakahveci erdemarz Deniz Akyürek ece Sure Tuna
