One of the oldest education institutions in Turkey, Istanbul Technical University, was seeking a design for the Isletme Fakultesi, Business School building. The existing 1960’s designed building is a series of masses that are spread on-site, connected with walkway masses — the program provided in brief for the new building almost required to fill the whole site. There was also a height restriction to match the height of the neighboring historical Macka campus. Between this historical Macka campus building and the new building, there is also a formerly Ottoman police station nowadays used by ITU. We wanted to avoid having a huge mass begging for attention from the main street at the same time we wanted the new campus to be iconic and exciting for its students, academics. 

After analyzing the given brief, we decided to split all admin into one single building, orient it to the site edge, which also coincides with a great view of Bosphorus. The rest of the program was catered for the students, where we thought the stacked mass of amphitheaters could efficiently work within the massing of a cylinder. The connection between the buildings is thought to be within the podium level, where the ceiling of this podium meets the topographical edges of the site; therefore, the podium seems buried underground.