Reading the Layers on Site: İskenderun Excursion

The Spring 2025 vertical studio takes İskenderun as its site, working under the theme of strata. Beneath the city's contemporary surface lies an intricate accumulation of natural and human-made layers: the marshland underneath, the port and its industrial edge, the French Mandate urban grid, the canal, and the marks left by the 2023 earthquakes. The studio reads these layers as both archive and catalyst, asking what was deposited by time and what could be activated for tomorrow. Students take on a double role, as archaeologists excavating the city's spatial narratives and as visionaries engaging with its most pressing challenges: seismic vulnerability, evolving port-city relationships and a fragmented urban fabric.

Fieldwork sits at the core of this approach, and İskenderun demanded it. Over four days, students traced the city's strata where they actually overlap. Walking transects across the city, they documented surfaces, sections and traces, recorded conversations with residents, and photographed the everyday life of streets that no map could fully describe.

What was collected on site, in sketchbooks, cameras and conversations, now forms the ground of the studio's collective urban analysis. Over the semester it will grow into individual design positions on the city's future, to be shared here as the studio concludes.