MEMORHEAL

This design seeks to create a platform that relates two life-giving phenomena.
The design commemorates healthcare workers who sustain life with the same purity and productivity as wheat fields, which contain meanings that mankind considers sacred about life, such as 'life-giving soil'. It has been planned to establish this commemoration on this platform, with some rituals related to giving life, and along the structural content formed over the lost river of the city, İncesu stream.

In this context, the design primarily aims to grasp the destructive intervention that mankind makes with nature and the consequences of this for our lives. Thus, it is aimed to understand the meaning of giving life and everything that gives life, just like nature. The main goal of this design is to realize that humans can also give life to something in every type of environment we live in today and in every negative event, and thus the world can change positively. Just like nature, healthcare workers are also struggling to give life to humans and have given their lives in this struggle.

Positioning humans in the life cycle of wheat to keep it alive through an action will precisely allow a good understanding of those who struggle to hold on to life and their efforts. Therefore, this design invites urbanites to provide opportunities for life, like healthcare workers, to witness something living, to strive for something to stay alive. Just like healthcare workers, it calls for understanding the existence of wheat, which we know exists but we can never see, its content coded into our trust-giving minds, its disappearance to fall into the ground and be reborn, and its strengthening and multiplying and becoming a "possible being" as a great cycle of goodness and existence.

In the design, the thing that will establish the ritual will be the predicted actions, and the actions will also be the meaning of the memorial place. These actions are thought to be urbanites collectively sowing wheat in the fields every October and harvesting in June. The ritual proposed by this design ultimately involves producing bread from the harvested wheat and eating "a bite of bread". Each sowing of wheat, each harvest, and the bread eaten together will remind us of the hard conditions and our most basic and human feelings that connect us to life under these hard conditions; it will remind us that we do everything with nature, not against it. As humans, realizing that we exist together with life will also enable understanding the meaning of keeping something alive. With the understanding of the struggle to give life and protect life like healthcare workers, the memorial place will find its mental and spatial/structural essence and simple expression. Therefore, while this design constructs its spatial experiment on the creation of a monument through memories and the rituals that will create them, it begins to produce from memories based on place and time, not images that can be consumed quickly or in a single experience. It will ensure the permanence of memories associated with actions beyond the primary meanings based solely on images and symbols. Therefore, the memorial place is not presented as a specific focus within the design area; it is built on parts and contents proposing actions and rituals. A construction has been designed on the route of the İncesu stream passing through the design area. This construction proceeds between the wheat fields in the design area as an abstraction towards the İncesu Stream. Thus, like wheat, water also finds existence in the design area as a structure that gives life.

In these days when we are detached from our emotional roots as humans and need to show our commitment to the world, it is tried to ensure that healthcare workers who lost their lives in the pandemic disaster are not forgotten. Abstractions related to wheat and İncesu stream are symbols of return to the essence. The primary design components proposed by this design to the end.