Urban transformation is usually described as the renewal of a single building. But putting a new building in place of an old one also means re-establishing the block, the street and the neighbourly relations it belongs to. This, as we see it, is where the work of architecture begins: the expectations of the rightholders, development rights, the qualities of the existing fabric worth keeping and the sequence of construction all arrive at the table as conflicting constraints; design translates that conflict into built form.
In Türkiye the real driver of transformation is not architecture but earthquake risk. In a building identified as risky under Law No. 6306, the process begins long before it reaches an architect’s desk: the risk assessment report, the rightholders arriving at a common decision, and state support such as rent assistance and credit. These look as though they sit outside design, but they do not; which support arrives on what timetable directly determines how many phases the building will be built in, and in what order.
The administrative side is part of the design as well. In Istanbul every district — Kadıköy, Üsküdar, Ataşehir — reads zoning practice and runs its permit process differently. Setting up a preliminary design without knowing the relevant municipality’s practice usually means rewriting that design at the permit stage.
Our work in this field ranges from a single 3,500m² apartment building to a 680,000m² settlement plan. As the scale changes, it is not the tools that change but the question itself.
At settlement scale what determines the design is not the façade or the plan type but phasing: the order in which people leave their homes and the order in which they return. Our work for the Kepezaltı-Santral area in Antalya was built on the principle of in-situ redevelopment and received the “Best Urban Transformation – Ongoing Projects” award at the Sign of the City Awards in 2019. At this scale, if the phasing is set up wrongly, a good architectural solution is of no use.
At block scale the question turns to layout: how the blocks are oriented to one another and to the view, whether the space left between them is genuinely usable, the relationship the ground floor sets up with the street. This is why at Enyapı Barbaros we placed eight residential blocks on a grid and gave the space between them over to shared use. A block is large enough to escape the constraints of a single parcel and defined enough to establish its own internal order.
At parcel scale the floor area ratio, the setbacks and the position of the stair core determine the apartment typology almost on their own. Mutluş Apartmanı, Hakkı Bey Apartmanı and Metro Home are works at this scale. Our office is in Suadiye, which makes apartment-scale redevelopment along and around Bağdat Avenue one of the areas we follow most closely; the room for manoeuvre is narrow, but the question does not change: what does this building give to the street.
The reason we keep working in transformation is not scale. This is where an architecture office comes into the most direct contact with the city: what emerges is not a building but a neighbourhood people will come back to.
Projects in this field
To discuss a transformation project, get in touch →