Invisible box: a long deserted ruin has been dramatically brought back to life by inserting a completely new interior

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2004

Istanbul still has many enigmatic ruins, rarely explained in guidebooks, and often almost impossible to date unless you are a real expert: is it sixteenth century or eighteenth, or even basically Byzantine? Until recently, Esma Sultan was one of these. In the old fishing village of Ortakoy on the Bosporus, the late eighteenth-century brick palace was a summer retreat for the daughter of a sultan. It was burnt down about 100 years ago, and became a useless but picturesque shell.

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Now, Ortakoy is almost under the shadow of the Bosporous suspension bridge, and is very much part of the great city. Yet it still retains a good deal of its village atmosphere, with colourful houses round a gem of a seaside Baroque mosque, and the area has become popular as a focus of entertainment, artistic life and a slightly recherche tourist centre.

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The palace shell is next to the mosque, and in the '90s, the Marmara hotel group realized the place's potential, and decided to make it into a centre for concerts and exhibitions. Esma Sultan proved so successful that the developers contacted GAD Architecture to make a structure that would allow all weather use--though Istanbul can be baking in summer, it can be very cold and wet in winter as the wind buffets down between grey planes of sea and sky.

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It was decided from the first to keep the enigmatic brick walls. The architects responded to them by creating an inner glass box, containing a bar and a restaurant on the ground floor and a flexible event space on the upper one. As a result, the nineteenth-century shell can still be appreciated both outside and in. Its massive presence shades the planar glass walls of the box, which would have been impossible to make as pure as they are in such a periodically hot climate without the outer brick shell. The two structures are linked by stainless-steel rods that allow them mutual support, but enough independence to cope with earthquake movement and high winds.

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The two work so well together that a casual passer-by might not even notice that the old ruin has been radically transformed and given new life. But from the upper floor of the glass building, you can at last understand why Esma Sultan wanted such splendid views over the Bosporus from her summer palace. An exemplary synthesis has been created between old and new that should be an example to more timid and mincing renovation architects.

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P.D.

Architect

GAD

Project team

Gokhan Avcioglu, Haluk Sezgin (principal architects), Phillipe Robert, Durmus Dilekci, Salih Kucuktuna, Ozlem Ercil, Kerem Turker

Photographs

Ali Bekman and Salih Kucuktuna

REVIVIFICATION, ISTANBUL,

TURKEY

ARCHITECT

GAD