VitrA Çağdaş Mimarlık Dizisi - Arkitera

Holiday resorts were designed to heal the war wounds of an adventurous generation,
with limited economic possibilities, after the Second World War and to allow them to
experience a self-centered recreational time. This generation liked living according to
the environmental situations of the places they went to, camping in a desert, staying in
over water bungalows on deserted islands and having adventures in tough conditions.
While we were working on similar projects after the Kemer Village Resort, an evolution
of tourism was going on in the rest of the world. The demand for comfort in rich
western society became more obvious. The costs of bringing heating and cooling to
the rooms of holiday resort type of settlements and the need for qualified employees
raised the motivation to build this type of facility. Investors shifted to more compact
block structures.
We have designed many Club Med projects. During this process, we closely watched
the company while it inserted comfort to its program without changing its basic philosophy,
adding hotel blocks to its holiday resorts. As the demand of German tourism in
Turkey increased over time, the German version of Club Med; Club Robinson became
our employer. We experienced first-hand from our design bench the evolution of this
group in the field of tourism and the monumentally successful growth of their projects.
The transition from holiday resort to holiday town has brought a high level of comfort,
multi-centrism and a much longer business season together, and our projects have
evolved accordingly. Transition from Çamyuva Holiday Resort to Fethiye Likya World
found a response in international tourism. We also found the opportunity to carry out
some of our original concept trials, which we could not make employers in other fields
accept, for Robinson. Pamfilya Holiday Resort is an original work which attempted to
inject the spiritual world of Eastern miniatures into architecture.
The transition of holiday resorts to hotel structures that can be used all through the
year was again due to economic reasons. The aim was to decrease the costs of comfort
infrastructure, and increase the number of beds by elevating the structure. Against
these tourist depots, we could only take a stand by presenting innovative and original
concepts to the investor and by achieving an efficient success. Inspired by the environmental
success of holiday resorts, we’ve started to produce tourism towns with
a multi-centered and multi-sectional morphology, taking Mediterranean coast cities
as a model. The commercial success of these facilities allowed similar projects to gain
success in Turkey and abroad, despite investment costs and construction difficulties.
We’ve always paid attention to project originality. We’ve designed different projects by
taking formation characteristics of the Mediterranean cities and analyzing topographic
and natural characteristics of the settlements, just as the Mediterranean coast cities
are different from each other despite the similarity in their setups. Here, the important
thing was to produce projects without imitating any image structurally. As in the book
of Italian writer Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, we’ve aimed to inject a soul, a sort of
story in each project. We think that the user should be faced with a different view, a
surprise, when s/he turns a corner on the streets while experiencing each facility. As in
the above mentioned book, we consider the guest as a passenger going to unknown
places in an environment which links places with memories. For a passenger going to
the Mediterranean, getting lost in an unknown city labyrinth is an alternative form of
real leisure, away from the daily vicious cycles of cities, with hopes and dreams coming
true. This working style has also been a solution for gradually developing facilities in
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