Slides That Follow Your Voice: Turkish Accent Competition Presentation

Slide 1: The Tree and the Children

0:17Good afternoon, members of the jury. Thank you for the time, and thank you for the coffee, which was better than in most competitions, and I say that as someone who has lost a great many competitions. [chuckles]

0:28My name is Ersan, I am the lead architect, and this is our proposal for the new district library in Yeşilova. I will walk you through six boards in fifteen minutes, and then you can ask me anything, and I will try to answer without saying the word uh, synergy. [laughs]

Slide 2: What the site told us

0:45Let me say first what the site told us. It is a corner plot, two thousand four hundred square metres, with a fall of three point six, sorry, three point eight metres from the north to the south edge, a plane tree in the north-west corner that is about ninety years old and that the municipality, rightly, will not let anyone touch, and a school on the other side of the road, with eleven hundred children, who cross that road twice a day. Actually, that was the whole design, in the end. The tree and the children. Everything else is detail.

Slides 3-4: The tree and the children. Everything else is detail / Board one: 40 seconds

1:16Board one, the plan. We put the building on the south half of the site and left the north half, with the tree, as a garden that the school can use at break. The library entrance faces the school gate directly, across a raised crossing, so a child leaves school, crosses one road, and is inside a library in forty seconds. We counted. Our youngest office member walked it twelve times with a stopwatch, and the slowest was forty-four. He is here, actually. Mert. He wants me to say he was the fastest too. He was the fastest. Okay.

1:50Board two, the section. Because of the slope, the building is two storeys on the north side and three on the south. The children's library is on the lower ground floor, opening onto the garden at the level of the tree's root level,, so you read under the tree without going outside. The adult library is above, and the top floor is a reading room with a long window to the south, thirty-one metres, which is the only expensive thing in the building, and we have kept it because a library is the one public building where a view is not a luxury.

Slide 5: Board two: the section

2:21Wait, is this three. Yes. Okay. Structure. Board three, structure. Reinforced concrete frame, flat slabs, a seven point two metre grid, nothing clever. The cleverness is in the facade, which is a double skin, with the outer layer of perforated brick that shades the glass in summer and lets the low winter sun through. We modelled it. Cooling load drops by thirty-eight percent against a plain glass facade, thirty-six in the second run, I should say, thirty-eight was the first, and the brick is from a yard forty kilometres away.

Slide 6: Board three: 38 percent

2:55Board four, cost. The budget is ninety-four million lira. Our estimate is ninety-one and a half, with a contingency of six percent inside that figure. The long window is four point two million of it. If the jury asks us to lose the window, we can, and the building will be fine, and I will be sad, I will be sad.

Slide 7: Board four: cost

3:18I should say something about why the window is so expensive, and it is the, how do you say, the mullion, the vertical, no, I will leave it, it is in the appendix, it is steel and it is long. Programme.

3:31Board five, programme. sixty-eight thousand volumes, two hundred and forty reading seats, a children's room for sixty, a small hall for one hundred and twenty, and a cafe at the garden level that the municipality can let separately. Our consultant says the cafe covers about eleven percent of the running cost, and I believe her, because she has been wrong before and said so.

Slide 8: Board five: programme

3:54Board six, the garden, which is mostly the tree. We have drawn a bench around it. That is the whole board. [sighs] The jury member on the left is smiling. I do not know if that is good. In my experience it is fifty-fifty.

Slide 9: Board six: the garden

4:10That is the proposal. A library that a child can reach in forty seconds, under a tree that was here before the town, with one long window. Thank you. I am ready for your questions.