Museum of the Sea and City / Hatice Canan ÇETİNKAYA
This project proposes a Sea and City Museum located along the Bosphorus shoreline in Vişnezade, Istanbul, and explores the intersection of movement, landscape, and architectural structure. The design process began with theoretical investigations of museum typologies and a critique of the conventional “white cube” exhibition model. Instead of treating the museum as a neutral container of objects, the project repositions it as an active producer of knowledge shaped by bodily movement, urban context, and environmental relationships.
Early conceptual models examined movement as an experiential condition rather than a predefined linear route. Through layered surfaces, ramps, decks, and vertical circulation elements, movement becomes a generator of spatial sequences, encounters, compressions, and extensions. A parallel study developed the idea of landscape as structure, where topography does not merely support architecture but actively separates, stacks, and transforms masses.
The final proposal consists of two main museum blocks connected by a central wooden deck containing gallery voids, viewing platforms, and social spaces. This deck acts as both circulation and public program, allowing people to sit, gather, and visually connect across levels. A system of piers, ramps, and stairs links the building to the upper park and lower coastal areas, establishing continuous access between urban fabric, landscape terraces, and the waterfront. Outdoor amphitheaters and green stepped areas host public events and everyday leisure, strengthening the museum’s civic role.
Programmatically, the project includes permanent and temporary exhibition halls, educational spaces, archive, café, and flexible event areas. The overall design agenda aims to dissolve boundaries between museum, city, and landscape, creating a continuous cultural territory. In this sense, structure becomes landscape and movement becomes architecture, shaping both the form of the building and the public life around it.
