Garden, 2020 
5th Istanbul Design Biennial “Empathy Revisited: Designs for more than one”

The Garden of the Worm and the Bird takes its name from the traditional saying “for the worm, for the bird, for food.” A bostancı (urban vegetable gardener) in Yedikule Bostanları typically disperses a handful of seeds onto the soil uttering these words. It is also a vernacular knowledge that this is true for the traditional farming in Anatolia. Of the handful of seeds dispersed in Yedikule, the bostancı reserves only one third to feed himself while the rest is intended for more- than humans. Theirs is an ongoing practice of empathy and a multi-species act in a planet where half of the habitable land is used to grow food for one species alone, transforming habitats and thus pressuring biodiversity. 

The way we see the world determines the way we take care of it and the way we design a garden is the result of what we understand a garden to be. How can we change the way we understand a city to be so that what it produces and imports is not mostly rubble and concrete? How can we change the way we understand architecture as a custodian of its setting? How can we design buildings, objects and landscapes as occurrences which maintain, repair and continue the world? 

The Third Landscape as gardener Gilles Clement has coined is “an undetermined fragment of the Planetary Garden -designates the sum of the space left over by man to landscape evolution – to nature alone. Included in this category  are left behind (délaissé) urban or rural sites, transitional spaces, neglected land (friches), swamps, moors, peat bogs, but also  roadsides, shores, railroad embankments, etc.” Garden of the Worm and the Bird is a garden of Third Landscape. It will allow the plants of Istanbul to grow as they wish with minimum intervention. The project will culminate in an implemented pilot garden with the generous support of parks, Gardens and Recreation Department of IBB and a visual catalog of possible alternative schemes for different scales and conceptualizations. 

Advising Committee:
Prof. Dr. Ünal Akkemik
Alen Mevlat
Levent Erkol
Elif Kendir

Design Team: Aslıhan Demirtaş, Aylin Kanar, Rumeysa Tıpırdamaz