Istanbul City Museum, Tepebaşı

A city museum for Istanbul on a site above the Golden Horn at Tepebaşı — a building of intersecting geometries that gives the city’s layered, restless order a single form.

The site lies a few minutes from İstiklal Caddesi and Taksim, with a clear view across the water to the great mosques of the historic peninsula. The museum’s task is to show Istanbul from the outside — a city kneaded by many cultures and ruled by many nations, complex on its surface and yet ordered within. That double nature is the architectural idea: geometries running in different directions that intersect, interlock and hold each other in place. The material palette makes the same argument in another register. Classical white stone cladding meets exposed concrete and aluminium, so that the building reads at once as the past, the present and the coming face of the city. Water, Istanbul’s oldest symbol, is drawn into the composition.

Three primary volumes carry the public programme: a market hall, a large foyer, and the city library with a co-working floor. Three diagonal volumes cut through them and hold the museum proper — the permanent collection, a temporary exhibition hall, and cafés, studios and workshop spaces. Every part connects to every other. Two circulation cores, one on each side of the foyer, tie the volumes together and give stair and lift access to each of them, so that the foyer becomes the room from which the whole building is understood.