The value of a building often becomes clear not on the day it is handed over, but years later, in the context in which it is remembered. Miracle Residence, Atlas of World Architecture , the compilation published by Braun Publishing in 2013, entering an international selection of contemporary architecture — and it is the only project representing Turkey in that selection.
What kind of publication is it?
Braun Publishing is one of the best-known European publishers in contemporary architecture literature. Atlas of World Architectureis one of the publisher’s comprehensive reference compilations: across 512 pages it presents 500 projects from Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas with texts, drawings and photographs.
The book’s editorial stance is what separates compilations like this from an ordinary catalogue. The publisher does not build the selection solely on well-known names and their familiar works; it explicitly aims to show “quality buildings not yet discovered” on the same page as the prominent examples of contemporary architecture. Being selected is therefore not a promotion but the outcome of an editorial assessment.
The selected building: Miracle Residence
Miracle Residence is located on the Asian side of Istanbul, near Sabiha Gökçen Airport. The site runs southeast to northwest and faces the highway to the north. The project is set out as two 100-metre blocks with shared social facilities between them; hotel and residential functions come together in a single continuous mass.
What carried the building into the selection, however, is the façade. Rather than surrendering to the familiar logic of repetition in housing, the 250-metre surface was treated as a design experiment. Fibercement blocks, compact wooden laminate panels and standardized window dimensions — that is, economical and readily available components — were used to build an interlocking pattern. The resulting façade takes its character not from a bespoke system but from the way ordinary building elements are composed.
This is a distinction worth dwelling on. In large-scale housing, architectural quality is often seen as a demand at odds with the budget; here, what sets the building apart is not the material itself but the way repetition is composed. The same window, the same panel, the same block — only the arrangement differs. From a distance the 250-metre surface reads as a single pattern; up close, each apartment’s own frame separates out.
In this respect Miracle Residence can be read as an example of how quality can arise not from expensive materials but from how standard materials are composed.
Why does it matter?
Given the volume of housing production in Turkey, it is striking how few projects are represented in an international selection. Atlas of World Architecturelisting Miracle Residence as the only example from Turkey points to something beyond the project’s individual success: that housing architecture can produce an architectural position from within the logic of mass production.
Miracle Residence was also published on ArchDaily and Archello. But appearing on digital platforms is not the same as entering a printed reference compilation: the first provides visibility, the second a lasting record. A building included in a book continues to stand, years later, in a source that describes the architectural production of its period.
At BFTA Architects we believe that quality architecture depends not on exceptional budgets but on a properly framed design problem. Miracle Residence’s place in this selection shows that this approach also finds a response at an international scale.
Credits: Atlas of World Architecture, ed. Markus Sebastian Braun & Chris van Uffelen, Braun Publishing AG, 2013, 512 pages (ISBN 978-3-03768-127-5) — Miracle Residence, p. 292. Photos: Gürkan Akay.