VitrA Çağdaş Mimarlık Dizisi - Arkitera

The Blue Hotel, built in Bodrum Gündoğan, is a structure that is intended to project
out from the natural lines of the topography and disappear again in those same lines.
This following of natural geographical lines is accomplished through the meeting of the
edges of various levels of the structure with landscape angles. This configuration, which
gives a sense of motion to the mass, at the same time provides a depth of perspective.
All of the rooms and activity areas of the hotel have views toward the unparalleled
panorama of the Mediterranean Sea, and the structure sets are all within walking distance
of the sea.
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Bodrum Blue Hotel is located at Kızılburun district of the Gündoğan Bay on the north of
Bodrum peninsula, between the excessively popular Göltürkbükü and Yalıkavak Bays,
in a relatively less popular area mostly surrounded by summer houses. With its radical
architectural language and design approach, the hotel distinguished from the conventional
tourism spaces can also be considered a bold architectural experimentation that
challenges the fake regionalism invented for the architecture of Bodrum after the 1980s.
In the pluralised and increasingly globalized world, the searches for essence supported
by the paranoia of lost identity and the nostalgic approach that has invented the new
traditions have directly influenced the perception and architecture of Bodrum, causing
an imitative and fictional Mediterranean image based on romanticized images to spread
out. With its homogenizing power, this operational Mediterranean image widely applied
through local building regulations has been used everywhere regardless of scale
and period, being transformed into a mechanism that obliterates all the diversities of
place and topography and producing forms of semi-urbanism that have lost their sense
of reality. Dictating the use of massive units with small openings, flat terrace roof and
white color, the validity of this operational image has started to dissolve especially after
the 2000s, with the influence of the privileges provided by the Law for the Promotion
of Tourism and the huge and bulky tourism buildings constructed all around Bodrum.
Within this semi-urban landscape formed by the pile of small individual masses,
Blue Hotel is distinguished with its experimentation with the linear monoblock 190
meter long hotel building and the consistence of this architectural statement that
extends over the sea. Not having any concern for thematicity or a reproduction of the
fictional Mediterranean image, Blue Hotel can easily be considered the most courageous
tourism building constructed in the region with its success in transforming the
potentialities of its place and topography into a non-compromising strong architectural
statement.
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