Skygardens Incek
Ankara / Turkey, 2017

Skygardens Incek was proposed as a mixed-use project in Incek area, the satellite city of Ankara. The Skygardens Incek is designed as a strong project that reverses the high density decisions shown in the zoning plan and physically expands the boundaries of residential uses and also assimilates the concerns of the local scale in the area. Although the project is being read like “a mega-scale housing project” by its own style and language, when it is separated into fragmented scales, it re-creates the "neighborhood" relations and the hierarchical plan decisions that form the concepts of "neighborhood". The project site is located on the North-South axis of Incek, the heart of the region. When viewed from an upper scale, it is seen that the project plot gives its facade perpendicularly to Incek Boulevard from the east direction and intersects with Yavuz Sultan Selim Boulevard and connects to Eskişehir Road which is the central axis of Ankara. For this reason, the parcel is, in fact, strategically connected to the city center with the shortest access route.

Skygardens Incek basically consists of three main programs: commercial, residential and office units. The surrounding building blocks are surrounded by villa parcels, which are roughly 500 square meters and limited in height by 6.5 meters. The strongest design principle at the center of the project is that the location of the Incek in city’s memory is modest and seen an alternative escape area for the city, but with density that suddenly reaches 100 in the region, it points to how it is managed and reconstructed for this project area. Skygardens Incek, which is not recommended as a conventional mixed-use project, is constructing its own density by distributing hierarchical levels and physically opening itself up to the surrounding parcels, avoiding any environmental wall in the project plot. Thus, the walkable city feature continues by touching the surrounding parcels. This situation, which is not directly observed in other large-scale mixed-use residential projects, is observed as a good example of how the project has created its own safety strategy with its own autonomy.