Istanbul, Turkey

Kağıthane region is preparing to be a stage for one of the urban renewal strategies that were developed to meet the need of a business center in the European site of Istanbul.

With the impact of the changes that has taken place over the years, the summer housing use in before 1900s and big and small scale industrial use later on, and with the industry slowly moving out from the district in the last 10 years, Kagıthane brook and its surroundings transformed to be a low- income residential area that is peculiar to Istanbul.

Even though it was near to the most crucial business center line of the city; Buyukdere Avenue, and it had proximity to the surrounding highways, Kagıthane has been unexploited for years. However, nowadays Kagıthane has been becoming more and more precious for investors.

Kagıthane Office Park project which was designed to be a contemporary interpretation of the texture of the district, including low-rise, human scale fragmented blocks with courtyards rather than a high-rise skyscaper, undertook a leadership role in the urban transformation of the district as we have expected. Referencing to this project and wanting to direct this healthy growth and transformation in Kagıthane, The municipality of Kagıthane offered us a land, that multiple people owned parcels from, to create an urban masterplan.

In this masterplan without expecting any commercial reciprocation, we aimed to create a plan that would set an example to the growth in the district and that would urbanistically guide the landowners who all applied to the municipality with different projects. To achieve this, we have constructed the buildings’ massings that were going to be built on the site, their silhouette impacts and their impacts to their surroundings.

The proposed plan, added the allotments and recomposed every parcel of land by maximizing the green areas and preserving the buildable areas that can be sold. The buildings were composed of 4-5 storey high buildings that have courtyards in the middle and that also almost reach the ultimate tensile strength with the scale varying from human scale buildings to higher buildings that take advantage of the buildable site area. The green areas were created from the area that was identified as the cultural center by the municipality together with the other abandoned areas in the land.

To position the high-rise buildings in the site by calculating the amount of shadow that would be created in the courtyards seasonally, so that the northern light was exposed to the offices whereas the warmer southern light was exposed to the service core of the building, was one of the crucial decisions that were taken in the project.

 The plan which indicated the ground levels of the blocks as commercial lots and had translucency between the connecting roads, pedestrian walkways and the surrounding roads identified ‘the cultural axis’, the area where the Municipality’s cultural center would be and the core commercial area would be, as the strongest pedestrian connecting walkway.

Kağıthane Kızlarağası Urban Planning Project, has become a unique project for EAA as it has offered us an oppurtunity to sustain our main approach in the Kağıthane Ofis Park project, which became an example in the region, and also as it allowed the parcel owners to see that it is possible to create a successful urban planning without having to give up the rent value of the land.