Yapı Kredi Culture and Art Center
November 2010 – completed September 2017
Yapı Kredi Culture and Art Center is a mix-use cultural hub, housing variety of functions including Yapı Kredi Publishing Company and its bookstore, galleries, a museum, a multipurpose performance hall and a library, all compacted in an urban corner lot. The cavity, facing the square is a vertical urban space. It is tight on the ground, spacious on higher up; rather a ‘Ziggurat’ than an ‘Atrium’, an extension of the urban surface into the building.
Location
İstanbul, TurkeyConstruction Area
5.600 m²Client
Yapı Kredi BankProject Team
Onur Akın, Tuberk Altuntaş, Ethem Aybar, Hande Ciğerli, Alev Dağlı, Gökçen Erkılıç, Avşar Karababa, Müge Kuzubaşıoğlu, Serhat Özkan, Pınar Sönmez, Nazlı Tümerdem, Mert Üçer, Mert Velipaşaoğlu, Yiğit Yalgın, Emrah Yergin, Ece Ünübol
The urban path winding up to upper floors contain one of the most famous plastic art objects in Turkish Modern Art: Akdeniz, a female figure embracing the world and its people, but this time, in an unusual setting, on a level that is higher than the street, promoting the idea that the city floor folds here upwards to facilitate a vertically stacked cultural program.
The project is both a renovation and a radical transformation. At the end of the day, what is preserved is the imprint of a three dimensional structural grid dictating the plan and the section as well as the facade. The virtual grid was manipulated towards a completely new syntax of surfaces and volumes.
