Professional · 2023 · Istanbul
Order in Chaos
This is the built outdoor landscape for the library building on the campus of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality — the first time I saw one of my own drawings realized in construction. It began during an early public-sector internship as a two-person commission — a plain *"draw this"* — and went all the way to built reality.
The method was plan-led. I pushed naming, defining and traceability into every element of the design — vegetation read as a measurable, ordered system rather than decorative fill, each species and surface assigned and accounted for. Renders were used not for show but to test the human-scale experience before anything was poured.
The project's name — "Order in Chaos" — describes its core. Where landscape architecture's organic material (vegetation) meets hard building material, a chaos-junction forms. The work makes that junction legible, ordering the chaos in both the plan and the human-scale design.
The Commission
Origin
The Commission
The job arrived during an early public-sector internship as a two-person commission — a brief as blunt as *"draw this."* What began as a drawing exercise became my first chance to carry a design from line to ground.
Working at that small scale forced ownership of every decision. The result was not a proposal left on paper but a landscape that was actually built and walked.
Naming the Plan
Method
Naming the Plan
A plan-led approach drove the work. Every element was named, defined and made traceable — surfaces, edges, species, levels — so the plan could be read as an ordered system rather than a loose collection of gestures.
Traceability meant any element in the built result could be followed back to a decision in the plan. Nothing was left implicit; the drawing carried its own logic.
Vegetation
Material Junction
Vegetation as Structure
Vegetation is treated as structure, not decoration. Read as a measurable, ordered system, the planting holds and shapes space the way built material does — a deliberate counterpart to the hard architecture.
At the junction where organic and built materials meet, the design negotiates the two languages — softening, framing and resolving the seam between the library and its ground.
Built
Realized
Built
Seeing the first drawing realized in construction was the turning point — the moment the abstraction of a plan became a place people move through.
The built landscape closes the loop the title promises: chaos, ordered — first in the plan, then at human scale on the campus itself.
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