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Architects: EAA - Emre Arolat Architecture, NSMH
- Area: 6800 m²
- Year: 2007
Text description provided by the architects. The Golden Horn has been Istanbul’s center and stage for centuries before it lost its glamour starting from the end of the 19th century, and gradually became drabber until the 1990s when it was rediscovered, and for the last 15 years, it has started captivating the city once again thanks to many new projects. Bilgi University offered to carry out the renovation and transformation of the Silahtarağa Power Plant into a museum and recreation and educational center; this typical modern industrial installation constructed between the 1910s and 1950s occupies a 107,000-m2 lot forming a sort of peninsula between the Alibeyköy and Kağıthane creeks right where the Golden Horn ends.
At the initial stage of the project, the aim was to establish a pool that would include all accessible strata of the installation in order to open up plausible channels of conservation and renovation. Research carried out within this context gave tangible results such as follows: the traces of the first project prepared in the 1910s are still to be seen, yet the tight decisions taken initially were loosened among the mass of industrial structures that had formed over the course of 40 years; formal violations had been made via pragmatic moves; though the stylistic characters and construction systems of the building groups, which could be generalized as the engine room, the boiler room, and staff housing, were decisively dissociated from one another, both sets of buildings had the same typical characteristics of the industrialized world at the time they were built. As more time was spent on the site and as we went deeper in our surveys, these inputs, combined with the sense of place that developed spontaneously, emerged as valuable clues as to the design decisions for renovation and conservation.
A carefully-established renovation style, which would take into account the situation and the object at hand, and which at each specific encounter would reconsider them and give them their due, was accepted as the common denominator for the different components of this rather extensive project.
