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 Bank
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.
