Kızyakup City Park

 

The leading role of Bursa in modernization has impacted the surrounding settlements, with all the master plans featuring grid-plan neighborhoods for immigrants, forced into the organic urban texture. Mass migrations to Bursa following the years of the Early Republic resulted in unplanned urbanization on the periphery of the city and neighborhoods unfitting to the Ottoman urban texture. The area of the competition is situated at the heart of this urban conflict. The major aim of this project has been to forefront and sustain the cultural heritage of Bursa and to transmit it to the future with the proposed modern living spaces. The project aims to establish a model for the interaction between the old and the new, and to offer a framework to rethink the relationship between urban cores and peripheries.

The project is molded by four major elements: historical buildings, historic urban parcellation, natural elements (water, air, sun and earth) and the patterns of pedestrian and vehicular movement.

The ‘Art Square’ to the north and the ‘Courtyard-Square’ to the south of the Kızyakup City Park are urban spaces for miscellaneous activities, festivals and concerts, flowing into a city lawn and joining the Gökdere river-pool. The pedestrian promenade, which links the Art Square to the new Bursa downtown and the Courtyard-Square to the historical urban core, is the spine of the project. A proposed monument to Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar will continue the historic fortifications and will become a wall cutting through the city lawn.

While the trace of history is redefined by cypress trees, local plant species are used throughout the park.