Şehrin Panoları is an urban memory online archive project.
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These panels can be read as a reflection of the process of change that began in the 1950s, a politically, socially and culturally vibrant period of the debate on locality and universality, from the search for identity in public buildings to the anonymization of apartment buildings with intensive urbanization.
Various panels designed especially in the 1960s and 1970s appear in different places such as apartment buildings, hotels, business inns, bazaars, hospitals, municipal buildings and bank branches. The panels, which were exhibited as a product of art in the social memory with the signature of the artist in this period, turned into a repertoire of ornamentation that served to meet the ornamental needs of the apartment buildings that were rapidly built in the 1990s in a standardized plan. When we examine the works we have documented so far, it is seen that each artist is reflected in the memory of the city through public and civil buildings in line with the artistic tendencies of the period, through their own identity. The panels of a period, which were exhibited as a tool with the desire to construct a historical identity for the society through spatial practices, have been anonymized by changing their identity by moving away from their context in time and becoming an ornamental element placed for the uniqueness of the building in which they are located.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
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The project emerged as a personal archival work of two art historians that started in 2019 and took shape during the pandemic. While the documentation of the billboards in Istanbul, especially on the facades and entrances of apartment buildings, continued, we expanded our research to Ankara, Izmir and other cities. At this point, we have tried to determine the place of the billboards in the development process of the architectural-art movement impact in Turkey and to give visibility to these billboards, which are part of the city memory, by creating a metadata on a single interface with digital archive and inventorying studies.
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Unfortunately, some of the artifacts that we traced in various publications and archival researches during the studies have not survived to the present day. The archive also hosts these lost panels as a place of memory. Another aim of this project is to serve as a source for academic publications on the subject and to create a road map for those interested/researchers who want to see the panels on site.
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The online site is designed in three main sections; In the Archive section, you can access all the panels documented so far and narrow your search by using the filters on the site; In the Map section, you can see the location and distribution of the panels on the map of Turkey; In the Bibliography section, you can access various resources that we have used during our archive work; You can contribute to creating a richer metadata by sharing the panels in your personal archive with us through our instagram, twitter and e-mail contact addresses below.
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Our data is expanding every day with the dashboards that come from you and that we continue to document.
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Mustafa Ergül & Nurtaç Buluç
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