Heritage reset
A proposed design by Istanbul
architects Yalın Mimarlık, “‘Çanakkale
Geçilmez’ Dormitory” in EceabatÇanakkale, is a response against the
recent historicism of contemporary
architecture in Turkey.
I
t is fair to state that one of the main issues in
contemporary Turkish architecture is the search for
identity. Especially in the last ten years, there has
been an increase in residential and public buildings
using historicist pastiche “Ottoman and Seljuk”
styles that can be found all over Turkey. These structures
that try to emulate the past do not go beyond stylistic
references as products of a superficial “façadist” approach
to architecture. The result being that in Turkey today we
are faced with a chaotic built environment with historic
Ottoman and Seljuk buildings on the one hand and new
buildings that copy Ottoman and Seljuk on the other.
Nevertheless, there have been recent examples of the
successful union of historical style and modernism in
Turkey. Of these we can point to the example of a student
dormitory in the Northern Aegean area Eceabat-Çanakkale
by Yalın Mimarlık, co-founded by Omer Selcuk Baz and
Okan Bal in Istanbul in 2011. The architecture of the
‘Çanakkale Geçilmez’ (Çanakkale is impassable) Dormitory,
2013, shows a successful strategy to establish a link
between past and present as a solution for the discordant
and chaotic built environment of contemporary Turkey.
The design commissioned by the local office of the Turkish
central government’s Special Provincial Administration
Department is a dormitory facility located on the border of
a national park and historic site, south of Eceabat, a small
town in Çanakkale on Turkey’s Aegean coast. The building
with a 700 bed capacity designed for students and young
visitors from different age groups coming from throughout
Turkey to visit the commemorative Çanakkale Martyrdom
site. Historically Eceabat, located on the Dardanelles Strait
was a vital port city since the ancient times dating back
to the Greco-Roman era. In the modern period the city
gained a completely different meaning and significance
for Turkey as it was the scene in 1915 of the Gallipoli
Campaign during World War I that saw massive military
battles between the invading Allied forces from the U.K.,
Australia and New Zealand against the Ottoman Army that
resulted in horrific loss of life on both sides.
Factoring in Eceabat’s urban scale, its relationship with
the sea and the size of the architectural program, the
designers have created a multi-part structure that reflects
the functions of each unit within a holistic approach
to architectural identity tied to historic typology. The
architects explain their design philosophy in the context
of architectural historicism this way: “The concept of ‘The
Ottoman Empire as an architectural heritage’, that led
Turkish architecture into a dead end in recent years, was
MART - NİSAN 2014 / MARCH - APRIL 2014 • NATURA 27