VitrA Çağdaş Mimarlık Dizisi - Arkitera

During the architectural design phase, the building form was designed to resemble a
ship, and the hotel was named “Titanic” to achieve international recognition. However,
the owners of the hotel were concerned that the name of a sunken ship could lead to
a bad reputation for the hotel. Consequently, the advertisement at the construction site
that read “Titanic Hotel” was removed and the building was renamed “Aygün Hotel”.
However, local people continued to refer to the building as Titanic Hotel. Realizing the
influence of this name, the resort reverted to the original name. Titanic Hotel is widely
known for both its interesting form and its unique name.
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In the history of hotel management, the initial boom supported by the economical
growth of the 1920s was followed by a second boom in the number of hotels generated
by the emergence of mass tourism in the 1950s and the formation of large
accommodation facilities. During the period of economical revival in the 1980s that
followed the recovery from the financial crisis of the 1970s, a third boom was experienced
that expanded the tourism sector to a global scale. This third boom was accompanied
by the formation of new types of venue, such as airport hotels, marina hotels,
condominiums and resorts. Besides their conventional roles as places of accommodation
and recreation, hotels have become spaces where leisure has been transformed into
entertainment in a process of pluralization. The first large hotel building oriented
towards entertainment, Walt Disney Resort, which was first opened in Orlando in 1971,
was one of the pioneers of thematic hotels.
With their distorted reality and false authenticity, the new types of cultural and spatial
representations observed around the Lara region after the 2000s have given rise to the
proliferation of “thematic hotels”. As a marketing strategy of investors and managers in
response to increasing competition in the sector, an attempt has been made to make
hotels easily perceivable, recognizable and preferable. Thematization has transformed
accommodation itself into an act of entertainment through activities and animations.
In contrast to the “Ship of Dreams”, the thematic resort hotel developed by Walt Disney
in Orlando as a replica of Titanic, Titanic Resort Hotel in Antalya was designed as an
abstract representation of a “transatlantic vessel docked at the pier”. In order to provide
each room with a view of the sea, the Y-formed building is positioned perpendicular
to the coastline, and is distinguished from other touristic facilities in the region with its
well known ready-made image.
The hotel has a bed capacity of 1,200 and a total construction area of 70,000 m 2 distributed
over 8 stories, and provides a visualization of the historical bond between the
luxury accommodation services of transatlantic voyages and the hotel management
sector. At the same time it serves as a reminder of how the minimal accommodation
standards of the transatlantic vessels were taken as a model in the development of
modern architecture during the first quarter of the 20 th century.
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