Cukurova municipality hall & cultural center

A municipality hall is usually recognized as a public office building, which people go to when they have administrative business to get done. While accommodating a significant number of staff, municipality halls also welcome many visitors on daily basis. Thinking over the past experiences in a municipality hall, most people usually try to get out from the building as fast as they can or they try to solve their issues in once so that they don’t need to come over again. This is usually due to the bureaucratic procedures that the people face while they are in the building which may seem as a waste of time. Sometimes the problem is the location of the building or even the lack of way finding signs that transforms a simple rectangular shaped building into a maze. Whatever the reason is, a municipality hall is usually evaluated based on the criteria that how much time one spends in the building. While keeping in mind that even a perfect design cannot change the speed or complexity of bureaucratic procedures, what we try to seek in this academic study is to change the impression of the term, municipality hall. The design proposal for Cukurova Municipality Hall seeks to change the quality of experience within the building using the urban park where the site is located in. Even though that the “quality of experience” is based on many different items, some of them being administrative issues (procedures, staff, etc.), the design proposal challenges to improve the quality of experience by interdisciplinary studies. Adana, the city that the project is located in, has been gone through a rapid growth in the second half of the last century. As the many other cities in Turkey, this growth was uncontrolled in many ways. Although that the issues such as FAR, height of the building, land setbacks are meant to be strictly regulated by the governmental bodies, the regulations have changed periodically each time the ruling power of the city & country has changed. This has led to an uncontrolled growth of the city, converting Adana, once known as a “land of cotton” into a pile of concrete. The design proposal aims to set a model for the new developments in Cukurova, Adana and also other administrative buildings in Turkey. Using the sustainable green concept which is not well known in the region and strongly relating it with the landscape are seen as the key elements of the design.