Excerpt: Büyükada Songlines by Studio Ossidiana is a floating garden and nomadic pavilion cruising the waters of Marmara and the Bosphorus, connecting Istanbul’s Princes Islands with the city’s shores. Designed as a space between politics, design, and ecology, it hosts conversations grounded in the material context of waters, soils, non-human animals, and the evolving Mediterranean landscape.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] Büyükada Songlines is a floating garden, designed to cruise the waters of Marmara and the Bosphorus, connecting Istanbul’s Princes Islands with the city’s Asian and European shores.
In June and July 2021, the garden traveled and hosted along its route academics and birds, events and conversations, fishermen and insects, dancers and feral cats, becoming a public and nomadic pavilion populated by the inhabitants and the stories of the city’s terrestrial and maritime territories.
Taking inspiration from Chatwin’s travel diaries, Büyükada Songlines explored in its itinerary how a contemporary definition of “nature” is emerging today in the islands, informed by the unique Mediterranean microclimate, the evolving migration patterns of birds, the depletion of fish, the interferences between spontaneous, cultivated, native and non-native species, the transplantation of corals, the debates on banning horse carriages and the conservation of the islands’ pine and maki forests within an evolving physical and social climate.
Threading into a complex political and ecological terrain, the garden wants to be a place at the threshold of politics, design, and ecology, where conversations can be held upon the very waters they seek to describe and transform, where topics can be abstracted and generalised, but also grounded, tied to a place, flickering between the material context of the waters, the soils and the non-human animals, and their cultural abstractions.
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