Critical Craft is a Scotland-based organisation working to promote a more caring practice of architecture in a multi-scalar manner. Having emerged as an experimental research practice, the organisation now hopes to expand on its roots in community-building and knowledge sharing practices through making, while intra-acting with materials in sensitive and considered ways.
Formalised as a C.I.C in 2025, the organisation places practices of repair and maintenance with equal standing as making and designing, recognising the processes of design as inexorably interwoven with material understanding and making technologies. Critical Craft organises and runs workshops while also contributing to research practice. In 2023, Critical Craft co-organised a workshop between İstanbul and Kahramanmaraş that explored textile waste, re-use, and collaborative weaving practices. This was then capsualised through an exhibition under the same name. The organisation has also worked on several projects in the post-disaster context of southern Turkiye, with organisations such as Hatay Earthquake Solidarity, All Hands and Hearts, ASF-UK and Herkes icin Mimarlik. This included the construction of 3 community spaces and publication of related creative commons licensed materials.
2024
Critical Craft worked closely with Herkes İçin Mimarlık and Hatay Deprem Dayanışması in the realisation of Çekmece Community Centre.
The first seeds for a community centre in the Çekmece neighbourhood of Antakya were planted in November 2023 at the ‘Antakya Living Heritage Forum’. The forum, co-organised by Architecture Sans Frontiéres (ASF) and Herkes İçin Mimarlık (HiM), brought together various grass roots organisations as a platform to discuss urgent issues regarding the interruptions to cultural practices and daily life in the aftermath of the devastating February 6th earthquakes. The forum culminated with a collective statement being published and co-signed by Hatay Deprem Dayanışması, Karaçay Koordinasyon, Hatay Ekoloji Platformu, Nehna, and Hatay Chamber of Architects.
The statement identified six main challenges affecting living heritage in Antakya today, covering issues including, population decrease, ecological destruction, safety and security, gentrification, collective memory, and loss of community spaces. The latter was palpable during the organisations of the forum. The destruction from the earthquake had left limited options available for hosting the forum and community events in general, a pressing issue that was also discussed during visits to the neighbourhoods within Antakya and Samandağ. Locals expressed how they had been affected by the loss of tangible spaces that hosted social activities, such as churches, cafes, and cinemas, this being exacerbated by the difficult domestic conditions post-earthquake.
The forum is also where HIM were first able to meet Hatay Deprem Dayanışması (HDD) and hear about the critical community support and engagement they have been making in the field since immediately after the earthquakes took place. We kept in contact after the forum, through WhatsApp messages and Zoom meetings, and what had started as a seed of an idea, grew into a collaborative project between HIM and HDD to design and build Çekmece Community Centre, supported by the Support Foundation for Civil Society’s ‘Local Empowerment Fund’.
If this summarises the conceptual and organisational foundation of Çekmece Community Centre, we can jump to the physical foundations of the project as a way of opening up a discussion on the wider design build process. For the foundations of the building we opted for double stacked tyres filled with gravel to support the building’s timber frame. This was a technique HIM had used the previous year in their post disaster response in Kahramanmaraş, except this time we were able to switch out concrete for the gravel, making it easier to construct using participatory practices and lessening the building’s ecological impact.
Foundations are a two-way conversation, ‘solid’ foundations being not just about what you put in the ground but the make-up of the ground itself. In geographies that are at risk of natural disasters such as earthquakes or flooding, the concept of ‘bad ground’ becomes critical, it often being acknowledged the buildings are constructed on such ground due to dangerous wayward planning regulations and poor construction practices. We became very involved and familiar with the ground at the Çekmece site during our first visit in May 2024, for the two-day design workshop. Having recently suffered heavy rain, the thick clay soil clung to our boots, resisting our efforts to trample through it taking measurements of the site. This experience animated our discussions with Bedir Bekar, the engineer who helped us with the specifications for the foundations, when asked for a description of the soil.
The design workshop brought together members of HDD, HIM, and participants both from Antakya and further afield. Gathered in HDD’s existing community space, a large container located in the centre of Çekmece, it was an opportunity to listen to HDD’s needs, respond to the site, and to receive valuable feedback from locals during two presentation sessions. One of the main outcomes of the workshop was an understanding that the space needed to be suitable for many different functions, should have a strong relationship with its neighbouring container which would host Rimmen woman’s cooperative, and would ideally be able to hold more people that HDD’s existing space. Over the weekend design sketches and ideas were gathered and continued to be worked on over weekly online sessions.
Before we discuss the building’s final design in the following sections, we can return to the foundations as this is where we began in the first build stint that took place over three weeks in July 2024. The combination of heat and shovelling gravel took it out of most of us but was also a great opportunity to bond over buz parmaklar (ice lollies) and the pursuit of shade. It did take a long time, measuring everything out again and again, learning how to use a hose and water to level the holes we dug, shifting around greasy tyres, and refining our techniques for stuffing them with gravel, but this shouldn’t surprise us. Those first weeks were the footings for the rest of the building, the top of the tyres sit just above the ground making our efforts visible and providing the necessary breathing space between the timber and the earth.
(Text from the Çekmece Community Centre: Rebuilding After Disaster Publication)