Tabanlıoğlu Architecture — vision and practice.

The firm

Tabanlıoğlu Mimarlık was founded by Hayati Tabanlıoğlu in 1956 and has been led since 1990 by his son, Murat Tabanlıoğlu, in partnership with Melkan Gürsel. The practice is among the most internationally cited architectural firms working in Türkiye today, with a portfolio ranging from corporate headquarters and cultural buildings to airports, mixed-use developments, and high-rise residential. Their work is regularly published in Architectural Record, Domus, Wallpaper*, and the international architecture press.

The studio operates from Istanbul with a satellite office in Dubai. Recent recognition includes the Aga Khan Award shortlist for the Atatürk Cultural Centre, and the WAF (World Architecture Festival) award for the Beyazıt State Library renovation.

Murat Tabanlıoğlu

Murat Tabanlıoğlu was born in Istanbul in 1959 and trained at Vienna University of Technology. He is a board member of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture steering committee, has served as visiting critic at Harvard GSD, Yale, and IE Madrid, and was the curator of the Turkish Pavilion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale (2014). His public discourse has consistently focused on the relationship between rapidly densifying cities and the human scale — a concern that surfaces in his residential work as much as in the larger civic buildings.

Notable projects

The firm’s portfolio in Istanbul alone includes the Atatürk Cultural Centre (AKM) — the reconstruction of the city’s flagship opera and concert venue, completed in 2021; Loft Gardens in Maslak, an early Tabanlıoğlu residential project that established the firm’s vocabulary for vertical mixed-use; the Beyazıt State Library renovation, recovering a 16th-century caravanserai for civic use; and Levent Loft, the office tower that defined the modern silhouette of the Levent skyline. Beyond Türkiye, the firm has delivered work in Dubai, Astana, Riyadh, and across Europe.

Design language

Tabanlıoğlu’s residential work is characterised by what the firm calls a “contextual modernism”: high-craft contemporary buildings sited carefully within their immediate urban grain, with attention to public realm at the base, generous internal volumes (the practice consistently fights for greater ceiling heights than the local market norm), and material choices weighted toward natural finishes — stone, timber, exposed concrete, sometimes brass. Their interiors brief on Next Level Istanbul follows this language: four interior worlds (Forest, Sun, Bosphorus, Soil) keyed to the unit type rather than a single house style applied uniformly across the building.

The firm collaborates frequently with the landscape practice DS Mimarlık, founded by Deniz Aslan, whose work tends to treat the landscape as a primary architectural element rather than a finishing layer — visible at Next Level Istanbul in the 5,000 m² of ground-plane gardens and the 200-tree planting plan.

The vision for Next Level Istanbul

In Tabanlıoğlu’s framing of the project, the central question was how to put a dense residential population on a fully exposed corner of Büyükdere Caddesi — one of the busiest commercial axes in Istanbul — without producing the kind of detached corporate-podium typology common at this scale. The solution was a two-tower volume set back from the boulevard with a substantial landscaped ground plane between the buildings and the street. The 4.5-metre ceilings on the signature units, the height of the stone-clad lower volumes, and the relationship between the office wing and the residential blocks are all calibrated to that balance: corporate-corridor address, residential-corridor experience.

The four interior worlds — “Forest” for the Villa Houses, “Sun” for the Terrace Houses, “Bosphorus” for the Landscape Houses, “Soil” for the Loft Houses — are an unusually programmatic move for a single development. Most projects of this scale standardise interiors and let buyers customise within tight constraints. The Tabanlıoğlu approach instead puts the constraint earlier: choose the world, then let the floorplan and orientation speak.

Further reading

The firm’s monograph, Tabanlıoğlu Architects: Continuity, is published by Skira (2023) and remains the most complete English-language survey of the practice. Murat Tabanlıoğlu’s lecture series for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture is available open-access. For Next Level Istanbul specifically, the project’s own page — including the 4.5 m ceiling-height detail, unit floor plans, and the developer’s assurance structure — is on this site.