It is difficult to concisely describe the city of Istanbul. It is a highly complex and multi-layered place that some have called it a palimpsest city, likening it to a text that has been written, effaced, and written again repeatedly on the same piece of paper. The Golden Horn, the direct context of the site, is one of the historical centers of the city on the seven hills. Recently, the area has been undergoing planning and development projects, and the coastline of the Golden Horn was the subject of several urban design competitions. The chosen site is complex - it is both politically and historically charged. Being at the waterfront of the historical peninsula, the proposed building will need to become part of its silhouette dominated by the Süleymaniye complex. Commissioned by Suleiman the Magnificent and designed by the imperial architect Mimar Sinan in 1550, Suleymaniye is a social center that comprises a monumental mosque, four major colleges, a soup kitchen, a hospital and asylum, a hamam, a kervansaray, tabhane, and other appendages. Like Alberti, Mimar Sinan was concerned with ideas of harmony and perfection prevalent during the Renaissance. His design is thus imbued with a mathematical rigor best apparent in plan. The proposal for the mediatheque will negotiate its place against a historical landscape that has been shaped throughout the centuries.

The library is increasingly becoming more inclusive to digitized media with our ever-growing influx of technology. When designing this project, students should challenge our typological understanding of the library and the proposed program sequence and adjacencies. It is critical that students consider the organization of materials, the relationship of circulation to spatial narrative, and the interplay of information and display. The course will ask design proposals to mediate between the analog and digital program. Each project should infuse their conceptual framework through the exploration of what it means for architecture to support the transfer of knowledge.