The Space Produced Within a Space

On Kemankeş Karamustafa Paşa, in Karaköy, at Bosphorus among the newly built ugly buildings, giant advertisement posters, shops and facades, stands beautiful and mysterious building Ömer Abed Han.

Ömer Abed Han used to be a commercial center (for wheat trade). These kind of buildings are widely known as “han” in Turkish. We know that it was built in the early 1900s by the famous architect Alexander Vallaury. He is the author of many buildings in Istanbul and his works are particularly known for an authentic mixture of Neo-Ottoman design, Neo-Baroque and Art Nouveau details.

The place was known as a customs house of advocates and other offices of upper middle class bureaucrats, white collars so to say. Even nowadays on different levels of the building one can see the traces of the old employees and working culture of this space.

Nowadays immediately on the right and the left sides of the building the visitor is welcomed by the overwhelming copy shops and glowing with blue lights electronic device shops, a couple of steps ahead you will see small, old fashioned tea house with low tables, almost always empty. In the end of the long hallway there is a shop of fishing supplies.

In the upper floors there are offices of insurance companies, shipping companies, accounting offices and some other unknown ones. Based on this description I would call it eclectic, maybe chaotic, tragic (if you take into consideration the change of residents and employees of this place). Yet, according to Henri Lefebvre the transformation of this building as spaces, based on the professions of certain groups, is an inevitable procedure, and according to Faucault’s Heterotopias concept this place would fit into the 3rd type of heterotopias, which is “… capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible”.

It is important to mention that architecturally, it is an amazing, mesmerizing place to visit, to be in, to exist, to experience. The elevator has refused to work years, maybe decades ago, and the owners of the building refused to make inventions in reparation. So, every day we climb up the stairs and till we get to the 4th floor, we pass through the layers of differently reproduced spaces, dark hallways, offices, load with paper work, high windows with circle tops and old wooden frames. Short bridges connect two main parts of the buildings to each other, by that creating balconies of light and freshness.

From the perspective of interaction between the body and space, to me, as a woman the building is a male-dominated space. Due to the so-called “men jobs”, employees also happen to be male, they create their own space, their rules, their atmosphere, their own space. I cannot (again) restrain from referring to Lefebvre’s theory on fragmentation of space, which according to him is linked to the divisions among specialized professions that have grown up to explain and tackle the city which in turn defines a truncated space as their own private property. This in turn sets up “mental barriers and practo-social frontiers” (1991:90) that have to be overcome if any unified theory of space is to be defined and ultimately implemented.

Beyond Istanbul office on the top of the building is a space with a unique atmosphere in here. While the gender proportion of the employees is equal, the atmosphere is dynamic and light, we create our own spaces inside this place, with ourselves, with our works and goals.

Every week, I am here to create a mental map of gendered spaces in Karaköy, which means, I am in a physical space to create an imaginary place, to juxtapose the physical (existing) space with imaginary one.

In order to get to the last floor of the building with Lefebvrian understanding of the social body I break the layers of the reproduced spaces, men spaces and floors of imagined and existing barriers. The Ömer Abed Han is not a space of fear for me personally, neither imaginary, nor experienced fear, yet it is a mysterious, shivery place, soaked in a history of more than 100 years and it still does challenge every and each visitor.