Bower — A New Core, From Old Cloth

Kayseri’s historic centre is losing relevance. As newer commercial districts draw people away, the area around CamiiKebir is left with an oversaturated textile market, poor civic infrastructure, and a population that visits only out of necessity.

Bower is a cooperative civic space that addresses this by shifting the centre from consumption to production. Local merchants donate excess and unsold fabric, which becomes the raw material for a shared workshop open to everyone. People come to make, repair, and redesign. What they produce is displayed and sold back through the shops around the site, feeding a circular local economy governed by the merchants and makers themselves.

The project is organized across three levels. The ground floor — containing a making studio, fabric exchange store, café, and foyer — is the most public layer, designed for encounter and exchange between merchants, youth, elderly residents, and visitors. The upper floor houses a design and production studio and a coworking space, connected by an open bridge, tailored toward younger users working independently. The underground connects a conference room and makerspace to the recently discovered madrasa ruins through an open air garden passage, bringing together active civic life and the buried history of the site in one continuous spatial sequence.

Above it all, a community built textile canopy shelters the central courtyard. Made from donated fabric and added to over time, it is the most visible expression of Bower’s governance,no single person designed it and no single authority owns it. It grows as the community grows.

Bower aims not to replace the identity of the centre but rather to give it a new purpose,  revitalizing not just the textile trade, but the city, the madrasa, and the social life that once made this place worth returning to.