‘Istanbul Modern’, Turkey’s first museum of contemporary art designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, opens to the public.
After seven years of waiting, Turkey’s first museum of Modern and contemporary art is finally back open.
Resting on the banks of the Bosphorous river, in the Karaköy neighbourhood, the museum covers 10,500 square metres and is filled with a range of new media, showcasing photography, architecture and design, while also housing spaces for events and education as well as library areas, a coffee shop, and a gallery store including new collections of items influenced by the museum’s exhibits.
Young by European museum standards, Istanbul Modern first opened in a warehouse (renovated by Tabanlıoğlu Architects) in 2004. After a successful start to life, it moved in 2018 to the Beyoğlu district so work on RPBW’s design, to date the studio’s first building in Turkey, could begin.
Externally, the museum features floorplates that increase in size at each level, dramatically staggered and supported on pilotis at their horizontal extremities. The façade has been made from 3-D-formed aluminum panels, sequenced in an array that playfully reflects sunshine, creating a glittering, rainbowlike envelope expressive of fish scales, all intended to evoke the reflective qualities of the Bosphorous.
The museum’s entrance elevation is defined by a stair that connects the museum’s public areas, with lobbies at each level supplying vistas across the sea and nearby park, framed by the wide floorplates that hide the ground below.
Inside, the Istanbul Modern spans five levels: three above ground and two below, with the upper three being defined by concrete columns that extrude up from below ground to form a structure that has been seismically reinforced with the aid of steel cross-bracing to resist earthquakes.
On the first floor is a photography gallery and pop-up gallery, joined by event spaces, education rooms, staff offices and a restaurant that looks out over the river and Historical Peninsula via an outdoor terrace. The second floor houses Istanbul Modern’s permanent collection gallery as well as the main temporary exhibition gallery, providing in total 3,300 square meters of exhibition space.
Image caption if you want an individual image caption.
Image caption if you want an individual image caption.
Below ground is parking and a 156-seat auditorium which will be used for the museum’s film programs and interdisciplinary events. On top, a viewing terrace hovers above a reflection pool that covers the building’s entire roof, providing further panoramas of the city.
Istanbul Modern opened with two permanent installations: returning from the original museum is Richard Wentworth’s False Ceiling, with Olafur Eliasson’s Your unexpected journey appearing in the central stairway, seemingly floating, as a site-specific installation.
Furthermore, the museum has opened with five new temporary exhibitions: Floating Islands hones in on a chronology Turkish art from 1945 to the 2000s, featuring a site-specific work by Refik Anadol that uses real-time data from the Bosphorus; Always Here comprises the work of 11 contemporary female Turkish artists, reflecting a long-standing ethos of Istanbul Modern to promote work from female artists; In Another Place shows portraits taken by filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, all in countries east of Turkey; Constructing Architecture sees architectural photographer Cemal Emden’s work (some of which you can see in this article) explore the relationship between architecture, photography and documentation as seen by Edmen’s collection of photographs of the Istanbul Modern under construction; finally, in the free-to-visit library, Genius Loci is a whirlwind trip around RPBW’s work, that, naturally, focuses on the design and structural organisation of the Istanbul Modern museum.
