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Thirteen centuries before Christ, just before the fall of Troy, and in the age of King Tutankhamun, a royal ship sailing through the eastern Mediterranean collided with a promontory now known as Uluburun. As the ship sank, its splendid cargo settled on the seabed for thirty four centuries, until being spotted by a sponge diver in 1982. A team of nautical archaeologists started an excavation and research project prolonged to take more than a half century, the findings of which continue to rewrite the history of the Bronze Age. This book features an architectural design proposal for a workstation for the research crew of the Uluburun Project. The primary topic of the architectural investigation is permanence. Proposing a year-round research facility that can later serve to display the findings is the initial design decision that leads to an inquiry of the temporal dimensions of architecture. Strategies to respond to the changing climatic and programmatic conditions and to employ the potentials of the milieu are explored as the means to achieve sustainability. In doing so, several unforeseen similarities with the traditional building practices are discovered.

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Esra Sahin Burat is an architect, researcher, and educator. She received her BArch from METU, MArch from Virginia Tech, MS and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a recipient of the SOM Foundation´s Traveling Fellowship and the ACSA Steel Design Award for Excellence among other awards. She currently teaches and practices in Turkey.

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