The Odunpazari Modern Art Museum pays homage to Ottoman Empire era architecture

The city of Eskisehir, Turkey is known as a vibrant city packed with cultural, which makes it the perfect location for the planned Odunpazari Modern Art Museum.

The museum is planned for a site located between a neighborhood called Odunpazari and a traditional wooden residential area with Ottoman Empire era architecture. The houses in this area are characterized by a structure where the second floor hangs out and lines up along the winding, narrow, and rugged road to form a unique streetscape.

The museum, which is made up of a stack of offset wooden boxes varying in size, is designed to reflect the small scale of the houses. The museum is stacked higher near the center of the structure and kept low at the perimeter to maintain the continuity of the existing streetscape.

Rendering courtesy of Kengo Kuma and Associates.

Using volumes of different sizes creates diverse exhibition rooms. The ground floor exhibition room is meant to accommodate large-scale installations, events, and exhibitions while the upper floor is an exhibition room tailored to the scale of the museum’s permanent collection.

An atrium exists at the highest point of the building’s center. Natural light pours in from skylights and reaches the floor level that would otherwise be the dark core of the building.

The façade of the building is made of wood not just to connect with the neighboring residences, but also as a link to the past with the Odunpazari (which translates to ‘firewood market’) neighborhood as the area was used for buying and selling timber in the past.

The 38,500-sf building is scheduled for completion in 2019.