COHOUSING RESIDENTIAL PROJECT in SANCAK DISTRICT / ANKARA
The architectural design studio for third-year students, ARCH301 of Fall 2015 offers a co-housing development for the residential Sancak District in Ankara. The generic block-type city planning of the Sancak District leads to dull, static, and non-contextual building environment for its residents. With this project, we propose a co-housing mixed-use residential development for the area that is devoted to artists and our proposal aims to question the existing urban fabric while creating a vibrant community. In this regard, there are four main goals that are taken into consideration from the early stages of the design process. These are:

1) Keeping residential units isolated from the high traffic noise.
2) Utilising the inclined terrain of the site to provide a decent view for its users.
3) Generating a vibrant co-housing community.
4) Breaking the visual connection between the city and inconsistent urban context by declaring a new approach to the urban context.

In the light of the program and site-specific problems, the monotonous urban grid system of the Sancak District is manipulated. This manipulation is enriched by the articulation of open, semi-open and closed spaces. The articulated physical environment leads to a rich relationship between residential to residential, residential to social and social to social. In this way, the site is considered holistically to become more dynamic and surprising. Residential units are oriented in a L shape at the highest level of the site whereas the shared co-housing facilities are distributed to the whole site and serve as social and functional areas such as studios, kitchen, dining, child care, cafe, market, and so forth. There are several types of residential units that are planned in variety such as 2+1 units, studios and duplex units. The units are articulated around a circulation tube which offers horizontal and vertical circulation between flats and terraces. Thanks to the unit articulation, numerous common spaces and private terraces are generated to increase dynamic social life in the co-housing community. The terraces are designed to utilise a good view of stepping green roofed social areas. Therefore, the site offers a wide panoramic vista through the use of terraced green roofs of social areas and studios which are not solely designed for artists and craftsmen, but also, to create a new urban texture in the Sancak district. As a later outcome of the project, our proposal was awarded a “gold prize” by The American Architecture Prize Competition in the 2016 Student Category.