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in trace of time
In Trace of Time: Eternal Echoes at AKM
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A living bio-sculpture in Istanbul, In Trace of Time brings the architectural memory of AKM into dialogue with the quiet presence of an existing tree, creating an evolving public artwork of recycled material, moss, shifting shadows, restrained light, and collected memories.
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Client: Istanbul Atatürk Cultural Center Directorate for RFM
Typology: Public Art / Living Bio-Sculpture / Cultural Landmark / Urban Memory
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2nd Place
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A Friendship Between a Building and a Tree
--
In Trace of Time begins with two presences that have occupied the same urban ground for decades: Atatürk Cultural Center, one of Istanbul’s most recognizable cultural buildings, and a modest European ash tree standing nearby.
One belongs to the official memory of the city. Its history survives through architecture, archives, photographs, performances, demolitions, reconstructions, and public debate. The other has remained almost anonymous, quietly recording seasons, environmental change, gatherings, absences, and everyday encounters.
The project gives spatial form to the relationship between them. It imagines the artwork as a new life emerging from the traces of both: an architectural remnant, a living extension around the tree, and a public place where memory can be experienced rather than merely represented.
The tree is not treated as a background for the sculpture. Its trunk, branches, shade, seasonal transformation, and continuing growth remain at the centre of the work. The sculpture belongs around it without enclosing, imitating, or overpowering it.
A Living Bio-Sculpture
--
The sculpture curls around the tree, descending toward the ground before rising again. From one direction it resembles a ribbon; from another, a low wall, a seat, a threshold, or a small stage. Its continuous, Möbius-like form gives physical expression to the project’s idea of time, but it is not designed as an isolated object.
Instead, In Trace of Time enters the daily rhythm of AKM and Taksim. Someone might wait there before a performance, sit beneath the tree, meet a friend, stop to listen to an informal musician, or simply notice a living presence they may have passed for years without really seeing.
What happens around the sculpture becomes part of the work. Shadows move over it. Leaves collect on its surface. People sit, cross, wait, and return. Moss develops gradually, while the tree continues to grow beyond the form designed around it.
The artwork is therefore never entirely finished. It provides a framework through which architectural material, natural growth, and everyday public life can continue acting upon one another.
Two Ways of Keeping Time
--
The project is shaped by the difference between architectural time and tree time.
A building keeps time through the things people choose to preserve: drawings, photographs, documents, performances, public records, demolitions, and reconstructions. A tree keeps a different record. Years remain inside its trunk as rings, while drought, rain, injury, disease, and seasonal growth leave physical traces.
These records are uneven and cannot be read in the same way. AKM’s history is narrated, debated, interrupted, and rewritten. The tree’s history accumulates quietly and remains mostly hidden within its body.
The proposal takes the first idea of AKM in 1937 as a conceptual starting point, while the building’s reopening in 2021 marks another turn in its continuing history. Rather than reproducing these events as a conventional timeline, the sculpture translates them into bends, loops, descents, interruptions, and returns.
In Trace of Time brings architectural and biological time into contact without forcing them into a single sequence. Cultural memory can disappear and re-emerge; natural growth may continue for years without being noticed.
Time is no longer presented only as a line on a diagram. It becomes something to walk around, pass beneath, touch, sit beside, and observe from changing positions.
Memory Made Material
--
The sculpture carries part of AKM’s architectural memory within its material body.
The proposal reuses concrete and steel from the demolished structure, bringing fragments of the former building back into the site. Materials that once formed walls and structural frames return as public ground: something people can approach, touch, sit beside, and watch change with the weather.
Selected areas of the sculpture are conceived as bio-receptive surfaces that can support moss and gradual organic growth. The intention is not to suggest that the artwork immediately becomes a self-sufficient ecosystem. Instead, the material creates conditions in which moisture, moss, staining, and patina may slowly accumulate.
The surface is allowed to age. Moss may grow unevenly, concrete may darken, and traces of climate and use may remain visible. These changes are not treated as damage to an otherwise finished monument. They become another record of time.
Reused concrete and steel allow the former AKM to remain physically present, while moss and weathering allow its material memory to continue changing beside the tree.
A Place That Can Remember You
--
AKM’s history is held through archives, performances, architectural changes, and public events. Yet people often remember cultural places through much smaller moments: waiting for someone, meeting before a performance, returning after many years, or passing through the same square every day.
A collective digital journal would gather these personal traces. Visitors could leave a short memory, image, sound, observation, or story connected to the tree, AKM, or the surrounding public space.
Over time, these fragments would form an informal archive of everyday life around the building. They would not replace the official record or be arranged into a single coherent history. Some memories might overlap, while others might contradict one another. Their partial and subjective character is part of the idea.
An optional AR layer could place selected personal memories beside archival moments from AKM’s history. Visitors might encounter a performance, a reconstruction, a public event, or an ordinary recollection without requiring the sculpture itself to be covered with screens, signs, or permanent information panels.
The physical artwork and the tree would remain visually primary. Digital technology would simply make otherwise invisible layers of the place accessible.
AKM holds cultural and institutional time. The tree records biological and environmental time. The journal introduces a third register: lived time, formed through the brief encounters, repeated routines, absences, and returns of the people who pass between them.
Unlike architectural history or the growth rings of a tree, this third record is dispersed among many people. The journal gives these otherwise fleeting memories somewhere to gather.
A person may remember a place—but through this accumulating archive, the place may begin to remember them as well.
Light, Shadow, and Circadian Care
--
Daylight is an active part of the sculpture.
As the sun moves, the tree’s shadow travels across its surface. Wind changes the outline of the branches, while foliage makes the pattern denser or lighter from one season to another. The sculpture never appears quite the same because the tree continually redraws it.
At night, small fibre-optic points appear along only one side of the continuous form. The artwork is not fully outlined, and the surrounding ground is not flooded with light. Parts of the sculpture remain deliberately dark.
The lighting recalls the illuminated cultural life of AKM without turning the artwork into a dominant urban light object. It makes the form visible while preserving the presence of the tree and the nighttime atmosphere of the site.
Keeping the light low, selective, and directed away from the canopy reduces unnecessary disturbance around the tree. It also recognizes darkness as part of the environmental character of the place rather than an empty condition that must be removed.
During the day, shadow records the changing relationship between tree and sculpture. At night, restrained light allows that relationship to remain perceptible without taking the darkness away.
A Monument That Does Not Stand Still
--
In Trace of Time is a monument that changes.
Its surfaces weather. Moss develops gradually. Shadows move across it. The tree grows beyond the form designed around it. Its light shifts between visibility and darkness. New memories enter the collective journal, while older ones acquire different meanings.
The work brings three records of time into relation: the institutional memory of AKM, the biological memory of the tree, and the lived memories of the public.
The project does not freeze AKM’s history into a single image or attempt to summarize the identity of Taksim through one monumental gesture. It allows memory to remain incomplete, layered, and open to participation.
The artwork is neither solely about the former building nor solely about the existing tree. It is about the continuing relationship between architectural memory and natural time, and about the public lives that unfold between them.
In Trace of Time does not treat time as a completed story. It leaves room for the place to keep changing—and to be understood differently each time someone returns.
Environmental and Social Strategy
--
The project’s strongest connection is to SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities. It brings together the cultural memory of AKM, the natural presence of the existing ash tree, and an accessible public place for meeting, resting, informal performance, and collective remembrance.
Its use of concrete and steel from the demolished AKM connects the proposal to SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production. Instead of removing these materials from the history of the site, the project gives them another role within its public life.
The bio-receptive surfaces and restrained lighting create supporting links to SDG 13: Climate Action and SDG 15: Life on Land. They are not presented as compensation for the wider environmental effects of construction. Their purpose is to bring material cycles, urban biodiversity, seasonal change, and the ecological value of darkness into the design of the artwork.
The project also relates to SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals, since its development would bring together architecture, public art, landscape, material research, lighting design, digital technology, cultural programming, and public participation.
Its environmental value lies not in claiming that one sculpture can solve an ecological problem, but in showing that cultural memory, reused material, urban nature, and everyday public life can belong to the same design conversation.
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Public Art, Bio-Sculpture, Living Sculpture, Cultural Landmark, Urban Memory, Atatürk Cultural Center, AKM, Istanbul, Taksim Square, Recycled Concrete, Recycled Steel, Bio-Receptive Concrete, Moss Architecture, Ecological Art, Sustainable Public Space, Circular Design, Cultural Heritage, Urban Biodiversity, Collective Memory, Digital Journal, Interactive Art, AR Architecture, Fibre-Optic Lighting, Circadian Lighting, Public Installation, SDG 11, SDG 12, SDG 13, SDG 15, SDG 17
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A living bio-sculpture in Istanbul, In Trace of Time brings the architectural memory of AKM into dialogue with the quiet presence of an existing tree, creating an evolving public artwork of recycled material, moss, shifting shadows, restrained light, and collected memories.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Client: Istanbul Atatürk Cultural Center Directorate for RFM
Typology: Public Art / Living Bio-Sculpture / Cultural Landmark / Urban Memory
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2nd Place
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Friendship Between a Building and a Tree
--
In Trace of Time begins with two presences that have occupied the same urban ground for decades: Atatürk Cultural Center, one of Istanbul’s most recognizable cultural buildings, and a modest European ash tree standing nearby.
One belongs to the official memory of the city. Its history survives through architecture, archives, photographs, performances, demolitions, reconstructions, and public debate. The other has remained almost anonymous, quietly recording seasons, environmental change, gatherings, absences, and everyday encounters.
The project gives spatial form to the relationship between them. It imagines the artwork as a new life emerging from the traces of both: an architectural remnant, a living extension around the tree, and a public place where memory can be experienced rather than merely represented.
The tree is not treated as a background for the sculpture. Its trunk, branches, shade, seasonal transformation, and continuing growth remain at the centre of the work. The sculpture belongs around it without enclosing, imitating, or overpowering it.
A Living Bio-Sculpture
--
The sculpture curls around the tree, descending toward the ground before rising again. From one direction it resembles a ribbon; from another, a low wall, a seat, a threshold, or a small stage. Its continuous, Möbius-like form gives physical expression to the project’s idea of time, but it is not designed as an isolated object.
Instead, In Trace of Time enters the daily rhythm of AKM and Taksim. Someone might wait there before a performance, sit beneath the tree, meet a friend, stop to listen to an informal musician, or simply notice a living presence they may have passed for years without really seeing.
What happens around the sculpture becomes part of the work. Shadows move over it. Leaves collect on its surface. People sit, cross, wait, and return. Moss develops gradually, while the tree continues to grow beyond the form designed around it.
The artwork is therefore never entirely finished. It provides a framework through which architectural material, natural growth, and everyday public life can continue acting upon one another.
Two Ways of Keeping Time
--
The project is shaped by the difference between architectural time and tree time.
A building keeps time through the things people choose to preserve: drawings, photographs, documents, performances, public records, demolitions, and reconstructions. A tree keeps a different record. Years remain inside its trunk as rings, while drought, rain, injury, disease, and seasonal growth leave physical traces.
These records are uneven and cannot be read in the same way. AKM’s history is narrated, debated, interrupted, and rewritten. The tree’s history accumulates quietly and remains mostly hidden within its body.
The proposal takes the first idea of AKM in 1937 as a conceptual starting point, while the building’s reopening in 2021 marks another turn in its continuing history. Rather than reproducing these events as a conventional timeline, the sculpture translates them into bends, loops, descents, interruptions, and returns.
In Trace of Time brings architectural and biological time into contact without forcing them into a single sequence. Cultural memory can disappear and re-emerge; natural growth may continue for years without being noticed.
Time is no longer presented only as a line on a diagram. It becomes something to walk around, pass beneath, touch, sit beside, and observe from changing positions.
Memory Made Material
--
The sculpture carries part of AKM’s architectural memory within its material body.
The proposal reuses concrete and steel from the demolished structure, bringing fragments of the former building back into the site. Materials that once formed walls and structural frames return as public ground: something people can approach, touch, sit beside, and watch change with the weather.
Selected areas of the sculpture are conceived as bio-receptive surfaces that can support moss and gradual organic growth. The intention is not to suggest that the artwork immediately becomes a self-sufficient ecosystem. Instead, the material creates conditions in which moisture, moss, staining, and patina may slowly accumulate.
The surface is allowed to age. Moss may grow unevenly, concrete may darken, and traces of climate and use may remain visible. These changes are not treated as damage to an otherwise finished monument. They become another record of time.
Reused concrete and steel allow the former AKM to remain physically present, while moss and weathering allow its material memory to continue changing beside the tree.
A Place That Can Remember You
--
AKM’s history is held through archives, performances, architectural changes, and public events. Yet people often remember cultural places through much smaller moments: waiting for someone, meeting before a performance, returning after many years, or passing through the same square every day.
A collective digital journal would gather these personal traces. Visitors could leave a short memory, image, sound, observation, or story connected to the tree, AKM, or the surrounding public space.
Over time, these fragments would form an informal archive of everyday life around the building. They would not replace the official record or be arranged into a single coherent history. Some memories might overlap, while others might contradict one another. Their partial and subjective character is part of the idea.
An optional AR layer could place selected personal memories beside archival moments from AKM’s history. Visitors might encounter a performance, a reconstruction, a public event, or an ordinary recollection without requiring the sculpture itself to be covered with screens, signs, or permanent information panels.
The physical artwork and the tree would remain visually primary. Digital technology would simply make otherwise invisible layers of the place accessible.
AKM holds cultural and institutional time. The tree records biological and environmental time. The journal introduces a third register: lived time, formed through the brief encounters, repeated routines, absences, and returns of the people who pass between them.
Unlike architectural history or the growth rings of a tree, this third record is dispersed among many people. The journal gives these otherwise fleeting memories somewhere to gather.
A person may remember a place—but through this accumulating archive, the place may begin to remember them as well.
Light, Shadow, and Circadian Care
--
Daylight is an active part of the sculpture.
As the sun moves, the tree’s shadow travels across its surface. Wind changes the outline of the branches, while foliage makes the pattern denser or lighter from one season to another. The sculpture never appears quite the same because the tree continually redraws it.
At night, small fibre-optic points appear along only one side of the continuous form. The artwork is not fully outlined, and the surrounding ground is not flooded with light. Parts of the sculpture remain deliberately dark.
The lighting recalls the illuminated cultural life of AKM without turning the artwork into a dominant urban light object. It makes the form visible while preserving the presence of the tree and the nighttime atmosphere of the site.
Keeping the light low, selective, and directed away from the canopy reduces unnecessary disturbance around the tree. It also recognizes darkness as part of the environmental character of the place rather than an empty condition that must be removed.
During the day, shadow records the changing relationship between tree and sculpture. At night, restrained light allows that relationship to remain perceptible without taking the darkness away.
A Monument That Does Not Stand Still
--
In Trace of Time is a monument that changes.
Its surfaces weather. Moss develops gradually. Shadows move across it. The tree grows beyond the form designed around it. Its light shifts between visibility and darkness. New memories enter the collective journal, while older ones acquire different meanings.
The work brings three records of time into relation: the institutional memory of AKM, the biological memory of the tree, and the lived memories of the public.
The project does not freeze AKM’s history into a single image or attempt to summarize the identity of Taksim through one monumental gesture. It allows memory to remain incomplete, layered, and open to participation.
The artwork is neither solely about the former building nor solely about the existing tree. It is about the continuing relationship between architectural memory and natural time, and about the public lives that unfold between them.
In Trace of Time does not treat time as a completed story. It leaves room for the place to keep changing—and to be understood differently each time someone returns.
Environmental and Social Strategy
--
The project’s strongest connection is to SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities. It brings together the cultural memory of AKM, the natural presence of the existing ash tree, and an accessible public place for meeting, resting, informal performance, and collective remembrance.
Its use of concrete and steel from the demolished AKM connects the proposal to SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production. Instead of removing these materials from the history of the site, the project gives them another role within its public life.
The bio-receptive surfaces and restrained lighting create supporting links to SDG 13: Climate Action and SDG 15: Life on Land. They are not presented as compensation for the wider environmental effects of construction. Their purpose is to bring material cycles, urban biodiversity, seasonal change, and the ecological value of darkness into the design of the artwork.
The project also relates to SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals, since its development would bring together architecture, public art, landscape, material research, lighting design, digital technology, cultural programming, and public participation.
Its environmental value lies not in claiming that one sculpture can solve an ecological problem, but in showing that cultural memory, reused material, urban nature, and everyday public life can belong to the same design conversation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Public Art, Bio-Sculpture, Living Sculpture, Cultural Landmark, Urban Memory, Atatürk Cultural Center, AKM, Istanbul, Taksim Square, Recycled Concrete, Recycled Steel, Bio-Receptive Concrete, Moss Architecture, Ecological Art, Sustainable Public Space, Circular Design, Cultural Heritage, Urban Biodiversity, Collective Memory, Digital Journal, Interactive Art, AR Architecture, Fibre-Optic Lighting, Circadian Lighting, Public Installation, SDG 11, SDG 12, SDG 13, SDG 15, SDG 17
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