La Congiunta and Karatepe Open Air Museum

Ceren Okumuş | Although it has been discussed in many different contexts, concrete still has content and history to trigger new productions. However, this can only be possible by going beyond the ordinary thoughts, definitions and images associated with concrete in history, expanding the discourse and “producing faults” and, therefore, two examples, thought to be “faulty”, will be examined in this article. Although concrete is a material produced by sophisticated construction techniques and has been matched with the modern, it does not lose its relationship with mud, old, shaped by hand, due to its rawness and atavism. This relationship also forms the basis of faults which has two meanings; the first one is becoming outside of the general productions of concrete by reference to the archaic, vernacular and primitive as an alternative to technological modernism; the second one is raw, rough and artisanal usage of the material by reference to tectonics as an alternative to smooth usage of concrete. Peter Märkli’s La Congiunta and Turgut Cansever’s Karatepe Eaves are chosen as examples in this paper, due to their faults in common even if they were built in different locations with different architectural approaches. Buildings construct the idea of working with concrete, not against concrete.