"Although the cities are made up of buildings & interir spaces and are actually defined by them, urban life is perceived and felt in the streets, the voids and the public spaces outside the buildings. These are the only places we feel together with many people who we do not know."

The lives that happen outside the buildings make up the series of visual urban images, in other words the memory of the city. Sometimes it’s a crack on the building facade, a tree standing there on its own, sometimes a bird nest on top of the electric wire, and sometimes just longing for the old times. A personel ‘punctum’ as mentioned by Roland Barthes perhaps, its cause of yerleşmek in the people’s minds unknown. These urban visual images are the ones that come out of the monotonous sequence of the city and capture us tight. The Former City Hall Square, at this point, defines a pretty fertile situation to say a word about the traces of urban memories.

When looked at from an upper scale, the project site is located at a rather interesting spot. This is a place where the old, historical, small-scaled urban texture touches the new, larger-scaled urban texture; intertwining and coexisting. It’s a place where different scales, different periods of time, different lives and different lifestyles intersect. Here, there has to be a balance between the past and the future. The competition site is described as a multi-potential space defined by the Central Park (P’), the old Cinema (S’), the old School Building (O’), the Mosque (C’) and the Former City Hall Building (B’). Our proposal for this space which contains functions and programs relating to the intersections of these different urban textures, is to create an anological connection with the old images of the surrounding buildings buried in the memory of the city and to outline their relationship with the city by defining their outer public spaces. In this context, the proposed design creates rich urban sections and qualified sequential outdoor spaces by connecting 5 buildings (P,S,O,C,B) which define the void in between.