Journal Article

Everyone Knows Who is Stupid Around Here

Kızıl, Sinan Cem, Derebaşı, Bengisu

2025

Overview

Far from alien to our daily lives, stupidity seems evident to most people. However, discerning what is stupid may not be as easy as it looks, especially when talking about architecture. To specify what architectural stupidity is, we must acknowledge that not all failures of architecture are ‘errors’, some are worse. This article discusses the already architecturally situated concept of error and distinguishes it from stupidity in terms of ‘technicities’ that fail. The Simondonian concept of technicity helps to locate error and stupidity according to their mutative potentials. We argue that the difference between the two is materialised in a failed theme park in Ankara. Planned as one of the municipality’s signature projects of the 2010s, Ankapark damages the tangible and intangible relationships within the land it sits on, Atatürk Forest Farm. This park, with its seemingly erroneous processes of engagement with the built environment and human and non-human inhabitants, bypasses any rationale and transforms a productive urban territory into an intransitive field for knowledge systems, institutions and disciplines. The cancerous mutation it feeds does not inform any knowledge system to the point that ‘it can no longer stand itself’, providing only ‘stupidity in stupidity’.

• Publisher: Architecture Theory Chair (TU Delft) and Stitching,TU Delft OPEN Publishing
• Subject: Amusement parks / Architecture / Dictionaries / Mutation