The Fixer's Island Review

     Our notion of access is undergoing a kind of bending in these days of increasing human interaction, whether of high quality or not. Today, if we want to reach a wider audience for any purpose, it is much easier than 10-15 years ago to choose a channel from that long list and reach this goal with algorithms that use our very own data and are tailored to our ''needs''. Not surprisingly, soon after, the people we reach quickly devolve into a number or a username. However, even if the audience we are addressing, or even "addressing someone" is not our motivation, these people with whom we share our lives in some way - through the sense of being watched - inevitably create a control mechanism over us. The self-control we already have in one-to-one communication gets much more manipulable when a secondary communication step intervenes. We then adopt an attitude of creating and reflecting the ideal of the norm to which we belong-or want to belong-and sometimes even placing it above being unique. Even if we have no intention of distancing ourselves from the self, given that we are part of society, we have a quite understandable tendency to conceal things that do no harm to anyone but which we have a feeling of "okay, this might be unacceptable."
     -Guilty pleasure- was first used to describe brothels in the New York Times in 1860. Although the term was not widely used at first, it is reported that searches conducted after 1996 account for almost all of the total. Jennifer Szalai from The New Yorker finds it paradoxical that this relatively discriminatory term has entered our vocabulary at a time when cultural distinctions are becoming increasingly blurred. She soon realizes it is more commonplace than ironic because the gradual disappearance of discrimination and freedom of expression can lead to controversial environments. (1) Because of differences in linguistic perception between cultures and because two words can merge to create a meaning independent of their constituent words, any pleasure that you prefer to keep to yourself without guilt or embarrassment - and there are almost no criteria as to why you should feel this way in the absence of any harm - or that might distort the ideal you have created for yourself can fall into this category.
     Given that we all exist in our own world, Guilty Pleasures, the theme of the third-year interior design studio at Istanbul Bilgi University, opens up a vast space for it's designers to demonstrate their creativity. The Fixer's Island is Selina's take on this theme, based on her own guilty pleasure: videos of rusted and broken objects being repaired, with only the repairman's hands visible. (2) The designers were given the site of Süngükaya Island, the smaller of the two islands in the Chios Strait between Greece and Turkey. This project area, also known as Fener Island, was home to one of Turkey's 432 lighthouses, 54 of which had accommodation. It is known that most of the lighthouses with accommodation were built between 1850 and 1933, and the Süngükaya lighthouse was built in 1863. (3) Due to increasing technological development, lighthouses no longer need lighthouse keepers to control and supervise them, so they have been neglected. In 2006, the decision was made that the lighthouses that were no longer in use should be open to the public, and the land was put out to tender for use as a community facility. (4)
On Süngükaya Island, there are two ruined living units, one of which belonged to the lighthouse keeper and his family, and one is a guest house, the Süngükaya lighthouse tower, and a boathouse. 
     The island is located on the ferry and boat routes from Çesme and Chios to the South Aegean. During her site research, Selina notices that the island might attract divers and tourists due to its location and distance from the mainland. She uses this information to shape her scenario to stay on theme. 
The scenario for The Fixer's Island conceptualizes a repairman living on the island, whose hands we only see in the videos: The Fixer, and the visitors who interact with him, mostly indirectly, through his objects. 
     The boathouse is the first stop on the way to the hill. Two shell structures at different points along the way have screens showing close-up repair videos, so this is also the first stop for interaction with Fixer. The ruins will be left as they are and redesigned only with additions and removals. In this scenario, the lighthouse keeper's former dwelling is a Fixer's cottage, with a workshop downstairs and a living area upstairs. A bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom. 
     The single-storey guesthouse has been replaced by an exhibition pavilion with an opening in the roof to display rusty, broken or already repaired objects. The lighthouse tower is now home to another guilt-inducing(!) pleasure: it is now a watchtower for Fixer, from where he can observe the visitors' relationship with the objects. 
     The aforementioned interaction, which I characterize as mostly indirect, becomes reciprocal and intensifies in the visual communication space created between the watchtower and the exhibition space. This exchange -which I could almost describe as a shift by shift- of objects, that the divers find in the depths of the sea and bring to the hill, and that Fixer repairs and leaves back in the exhibition space, through the visual language Selina uses in the project frankly stiffens all my muscles. Yet something about this project makes me fidget in my seat and think that I wouldn't want to be a visitor there. I feel like I am in a guilty pleasure cycle. 
     If I link this scenario created by mysterious spaces to the earlier argument that our perception of access changes, then increasing interaction through different channels does not always mean direct access to the other person. While the Fixer ultimately sees the people he observes from a distance as numbers, the visitors remember the Fixer through the objects and the creative experience offered to them through the objects. 
The first thing I wondered about when discussing the project was whether the visitors knew they were being watched. The alternative scenario that came to mind was whether the experience could take on a freer character for the visitors and an experimental character for Fixer, where the awareness of being watched and, thus, self-control disappeared.
     When I was writing about The Fixer's Island and even listening to Selina beforehand, although I was aware of the conceptual value of the project - perhaps because I was studying to be an architect, not an interior designer - I had questions about the fact that the addressees of the designed experience were a very limited group of people. Then, while researching experience architecture, I came across a quote from Zumthor:
"Contemporary architecture should be just as radical as contemporary music. But there are limits. Although a work of architecture based on disharmony and fragmentation, on broken rhythms, clustering, and structural disruptions may be able to convey a message, as soon as we understand its statement, our curiosity dies, and all that is left is the question of the building's practical usefulness. Architecture has its own realm. It has a special physical relationship with life. I do not think of it primarily as either a message or a symbol but as an envelope and background for life which goes on in and around it, a sensitive container for the rhythm of footsteps on the floor, for the concentration of work, for the silence of sleep." (5)

          Although this mysterious experience that one can have on the island is very intriguing, the comprehensiveness and practical value of the scenario, which focuses on only one aspect, is of course open to debate, as with any subject.​​​​​​​
* https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/against-guilty-pleasure
* https://www.behance.net/gallery/119244703/The-Fixers-Island 
* http://egemimarlik.org/89-90/7.pdf Türkiye’deki Deniz Fenerlerinin Mimari Özellikleri
* https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%BCrkiye%27deki_deniz_fenerleri_listesi 
* https://xxi.com.tr/i/mimarligi-minorde-dusunmek 
* https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/loves-evolver/201005/why-its-good-feel-guilty