Academic Paper
Author: Oya Yesim Armagan (Istanbul Technical University)
This article traces the parallel operation of additive and subtractive forces across the territory and the participation of ritual layering, industrial extraction, maintenance, and neglect in the long durations of soil. Focusing on two sites in the Gediz River Basin in western Anatolia — Laletepe, a Lydian tumulus, and Çakalazmağı, a landscape shaped by decades of industrial clay extraction — the study reads them within a shared stratigraphy as regimes where continuity and rupture are intertwined. At Laletepe, an additive burial technique forms a stratum in which life, death, agriculture, and geology converge across time. Its integration with vineyards, alluvial flows, and ritual memory reveals soil as a co-producer of cultural and ecological temporality. By contrast, the extraction pits and artificial lakes of Çakalazmağı function as subtractive interventions that reorganise the ground’s temporal fabric. These voids produce hybrid stratigraphies of sediment, debris, and erosion where weathering continues to inscribe time beyond formal construction. The article advances a stratified understanding of temporality in which the past is materially retained in the present and architectural action unfolds across layered, interscalar durations. Climate is thus reconceived as the temporal expression of these entanglements, rather than an external parameter against which architecture is measured. In this light, the Gediz Basin becomes both a site of inquiry and a conceptual ground for rethinking architecture’s relation to the earth.
Keywords: materiality, terra rosa, geologic time, gediz river, post-anthropocene
How to Cite: Armagan, O. (2026) “A Lydian Tumulus and its Entangled Neighbours: Architecture in/as Stratified Ground”, field. 11(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.62471/field.189
None