The Meydan Shopping Center in Istanbul by FOA

At the end of August, a ceremonial opening of the Meydan shopping center designed by the London office of Foreign Office Architects will take place in the Istanbul district of Ümraniye. The client was Metro Group Asset Management, which chose the studio of Alejandro Zaera-Polo after a workshop held in 2005, to which a total of five architectural teams were invited. FOA employed its proven recipe of intertwining the building with the surrounding landscape. The individual floors of the shopping center, covering a total area of 70,000 m², stack upon one another, bend, and connect. The project, named Meydan, which means marketplace in Turkish, is set to become part of the public space of the new center of the emerging Ümraniye urban district. In addition to a giant electronics store and supermarket, the center focuses on sports, fashion, and offers a plethora of smaller shops. The service offer is rounded off with a large multiplex featuring a wide range of restaurants. A geothermal system is installed beneath the shopping center, which caters to the cooling and heating of the entire building. Green roof cultivation just started this June. Moreover, the builder states in his report that “the complex takes on the original face of Ümraniye while simultaneously giving it a contemporary and future-oriented appearance. The meadows of wild herbs on the flat roofs are a substitution for the history of this urban district. Just a few decades ago, Ümraniye, which is now experiencing a massive construction boom, had a rural character with fewer than nine hundred residents.”
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