Ayvansaray Urban Design Studies

The Ayvansaray area was evaluated within the scope of successive urban interventions carried out together with the neighbourhoods of Fener and Balat, and became one of the direct impact areas of the rehabilitation process conducted between 1998 and 2005.

Within this process, Ayvansaray was located in the study area determined by the overlapping of the boundaries of urban projects covering Fener and Balat, and survey, restitution and restoration outputs for the area were addressed within this integrated framework.

The urban fabric in Ayvansaray is characterised by a grid-plan settlement pattern that developed after the 19th-century fires, and this fabric shows similarities in scale and form with the post-fire transformed urban fabrics in the neighbourhoods of Fener and Balat.

This textural similarity can also be traced on the 1913–1914 maps known as the German Blues (Alman Mavileri), and reveals that the building-plot-street relationships in Ayvansaray, Fener and Balat were shaped by a common historical process.

Deteriorating environmental conditions in the region from the late 19th century, inadequate infrastructure and the physical weakening of the building stock are among the main issues identified for the area that also includes Ayvansaray.

It is noted that, as in Fener, Balat and the surrounding area, buildings in Ayvansaray were also significantly damaged by the 1894 earthquake, and that this situation increased the fragility of the existing building stock.

The planning of the Golden Horn environs as an industrial area at the beginning of the 20th century led to increased environmental pollution along the coastline, including Ayvansaray, and a further deterioration of living conditions.

This process of physical and environmental deterioration made building-scale interventions necessary within the rehabilitation approach developed for the 1998–2005 period, and required the preparation of survey, restitution and restoration projects for each building.

Within the scope of the rehabilitation process, interventions on buildings were defined under two technical categories as "simple repair" and "comprehensive restoration", and implementations were planned according to this distinction.

The prepared survey, restitution and restoration projects were submitted for Conservation Board approval, and implementations were carried out with a level of technical precision rarely seen in urban conservation projects in Turkey.

Within this scope, the survey and restoration preparations carried out in Ayvansaray were addressed within a technical coordination process aimed at documenting the area's historic urban fabric, building-plot relationships and original architectural qualities.

It is emphasised that survey work is an essential tool for the preservation of the post-fire grid fabric and for the documentation of the original plan, facade and mass characteristics of the buildings.

In conclusion, within this rehabilitation process carried out together with Fener and Balat, Ayvansaray was evaluated as one of the areas requiring technical coordination in the phase of preparing survey and restoration projects, and building-scale interventions developed within this framework were addressed accordingly.