The Lady — High-Rise, Levent

A skyscraper for Levent that changes the Istanbul skyline, and therefore had one obligation above all others: to be worth looking at for a hundred years.

A tower on this skyline is seen from the Bosphorus, from the bridges and from every hill of the city, so its aesthetic was not a finishing layer but the starting point. The brief we set ourselves was timeless, functional elegance with a monumental presence — a form legible from ten kilometres and still calm at ten metres. The answer is a tower in two legs that rise from a shared plinth, twist gently against each other as they climb and rejoin at the crown. The twist is what gives the building its name: the two legs turn the way an oriental dancer turns, with weight and grace at once. We called it the Lady.

The opening between the legs is not only a gesture. Behind the tower, on the hill, lies a dense neighbourhood of modest houses. A solid slab would have taken their morning sun; the gap between the legs lets the low eastern light through to the streets behind. Elegance and neighbourliness turned out to be the same decision.

The site drops steeply from the boulevard, and the plinth follows the ground into the hillside: parking at the lowest level, offices and an events hall above it, the entrance and market at grade. Over the plinth lies a sheet of water, and beneath the water sits a new-media centre — lit from above through the pool, a workplace that sits under the surface because it does a different kind of work. From the boulevard the building reads as a single monumental figure; from the hill, between its legs, it lets the city through.