Gallipoli Memorial Gardens

GALLIPOLI MEMORIAL GARDENS ‘Gallipoli Memorial Gardens’ is an architectural concept, produced and proposed for a two-stage national ideas competition organized in 2017, for the design of 15 recently discovered war cemeteries on the historic site of the Gallipoli Peninsula. The proposal has been awarded an Honorable Mention. GALLIPOLI / MONUMENT DE FACTO One of the major, if not most strategic fronts of WWI, the Gallipoli Peninsula, today hosts countless battlefield sites, cemeteries belonging to different countries and monuments dedicated to thousands of lost souls who had participated in the Gallipoli Campaign between 1915 and 1916. The peninsula is now a protected natural reserve and a national park dedicated to world peace. With its spectacular topography, successfully preserved natural landscape, unique flora & fauna, and multi-layered warfare memory, the peninsula itself stands as a ‘monument’ on the other side of the Dardanelles. VISITOR EXPERIENCE Today there are different types of memorials, cemeteries and monuments on the park that were built at different periods in history which offer a whole different kind of visitor experience. Two relatively older memorials like the ‘Zığındere Infirmary Cemetery’ and the ‘57. Infantry Regiment’ are examples of the traditional monumentalization that facilitates the visitor’s experience of historical memory through certain symbols and architecture. In these kinds of memorials, elements like obelisks, steles, statues, triumphal arches, and inscriptions generally build barriers between the remembered ones and the remembering visitor. Some more recent examples like the ‘Zeytindere Cemeteries’ on the contrary, can be considered as ‘counter-monuments.’ These kinds of cemeteries allow the visitors to somehow form a deeper relationship with the remembered ones by liberating the site from the instruments of traditional monumentalization and purifying the site in a natural setting. The visitor is free in these cases to have a more personalized experience. However the inevitable necessities of a physical environment that is visited by a huge number of people everyday, which include parking lots, souvenir shops, kiosks and rest rooms often ruin the purity of the experience of contemplation. The experience of visiting a battlefield, a war memorial or a cemetery is arguably a personal one. The rational analysis of a war, the legitimization of any military action, international politics or written historical discourse lose meaning during this experience. Dissociated from any kind of national or social attachments, the visitor is humble and singular while facing the loss. This harsh encounter with reality always comes with two reflections; to remember and to forget. These two actions collaboratively construct the memory. MEMORIAL GARDENS The recently discovered war cemeteries (actually mass graves) are geographically scattered around the peninsula in an extensive area of 25kms in diameter. Located precisely with photogrammetric techniques and ultra-sonic terrain sweeps, all 15 sites are located on variable terrain types, reflecting the diverse geographic characteristics of the peninsula. Some sites are on the bottom of a steep valley basin, some are on a slope of a hill, and some are in a forest. They also show different characteristics in terms of their vegetation and micro-climatic properties. The name ‘Memorial Garden’ is an integrated part of the new architectural concept that has been proposed. Rather than calling these new sites ‘war cemeteries’ which certainly have a reference to ‘death,’ we chose to call them ‘gardens’ in reference to ‘life’. The ‘Memorial Gardens’ are abstract volumes in a natural setting. Their strict geometry, consisting of orthogonal planimetric organizations derived from the specified borders of the discovered graveyards, is in high contrast with their environment. Offset at a safe distance around the designated polygons, pathways and peripheric walls enclose each piece of land. A special kind of exposed concrete made up of local mid-sized rubble aggregate is used for both the pathways and the walls. A bronze plate framing the sacred lands is used to inscribe the names of the fallen. The height of the peripheric walls around each garden void is anchored at a standard height according to the local topography, defining the linear edge of the horizon which separates the natural landscape outside with the curated landscape inside. Rubble is piled up outside the walls to formally blend the void into the landscape so that the borders of the gardens are not recognizable from the exterior. The visitor reaches the gardens through a mediated progressive route which gradually shifts the experienced timescape from standard daily life to that of nature. The route first deviates from the main motorway network onto a secondary level track, and finally onto a footpath leading to the garden entrance axis. Once the visitor enters a garden, time stops. The memorial gardens suddenly appear in the silent and deserted landscapes of the peninsula like a remaining historical war trench, or an archaeological artifact resembling the ancient typologies of tombs like a mastaba, a mound or a pyramid. With each garden, a different type of vegetation, soundscape, and colourscape welcomes the visitor. Contemplating inside the garden while walking on the peripheric pathway around the sacred piece of land as it elevates or drops according to the natural topography of the site, the visitor experiences diverse visual perspectives with the outside landscape. The visual experience sometimes widens facing the Salt Lake and the Suvla Cove in the distant landscape and sometimes narrows by the high and deep garden walls that frame the trembling leaves of a nearby tree or the fast moving clouds up in the sky. The mathematical design strategy is the same for all 15 sites, but the architectural result changes according to the size of the graveyard and the local topography, thus creating multiple variations on a common theme. Also this design strategy consists of natural and temporal inputs as well. It is anticipated that in an undefined timeframe, the rubble piled up outside the walls will be taken over by nature just as any other piece of land on the peninsula and the mound like structure will blend into the landscape making these artifacts and their designers somehow transparent and invisible. For all the visuals, drawings and detailed information on Gallipoli Memorial Gardens, please visit www.steb.co or www.arkiv.com.tr.