Grand Galata, Bazaar Bridge Part 2 Project 2005 Nigel PeakeMatthew Thompson University of Edinburgh Edinburgh | UK An investigation of the gesture and personal exchange of the Grand Bazaar was taken to the urban transaction identified to exist in Galata Bridge.The Bazaar is a wonderful labyrinthine box enclosing over 4000 shops, sixty streets and alleyways punctured with courtyards. People hustling, bargaining and arguing. The hypothesis under investigation is that gesture exists, as a condition, before language. Galata Bridge is the physical borderland that bridges the Eminonu and Galata side. The proposal is to inhabit this in-between condition, and to revitalize the bridge in the way a delicately inserted ‘slab’ mends a stair. The bridge falls apart metaphorically where the Grand Bazaar elevates and become a theatre of the everyday. To breath new life into the Bridge, the thesis brings the Grand Bazaar to the bridge. Elaborating its liminal condition, the formality of this project is a correspondence between the structural logic of the Galata Bridge and the equally rhythmical but incidental character of bodies moving across the bridge. Nigel has drawn upon the flux of fisherman, vendors and pedestrians and the to-and-fro of urban exchange. It is analogized to the Grand Bazaar through a wonderful system of architectural notation. This system of notation is woven across the plan and through the section. The important urban site of the Galata Bridge, now like a multiple-storey Grand Bazaar, celebrates and further enriches a particular character of being in Istanbul – the coupled effects of hybridity and human interaction. Tutor(s)