Interior Design for the Bar Association Intern Education Center

The brief was for the adaptive reuse of a historical building in the Galata. As the building no longer coincided with contemporary expectations for a residential building, there was an obligation to find and apply a new functional program. In this case, the work entailed structural reinforcement and renovation to bring the space into a condition suitable for a research library on behalf of the Istanbul Bar Association. Many design solutions and details were completed in-situ with input from the laborors, allowing for both an efficiency and a creative freedom that studio work would not have permitted with this type of adaptive reuse project. The concept was to expose the building’s history, but at the same time to avoid the pretense of historical re-creation. The design is about the past and the present simultaneously: circumventing the gaffe of freezing an architecture expression at some arbitrary moment in time that is irrelevant to current and future demands. Our intervention into the space is conceived of as an installation, inviting a dialogue between new and old architectural materials, details, and expressions.

Budget: 20.000 €
Location: Istanbul, Turkey