OMA has recently completed Beymen Tersane, an eye-catching department store in Istanbul for the Turkish luxury retailer Beymen Group. Realized in collaboration with local studio Bağımsız İşler Studio, this is OMA’s first completed project in Turkey.

Beymen Tersane occupies former shipbuilding halls in the city’s Haliç shipyard district, giving new life to a long-abandoned industrial structure. Also known as the Golden Horn, the Haliç, which translates to estuary, is at the junction of the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara. The adjoining waterfront district was once home to the Tersane-i Âmire, or the Ottoman Imperial Arsenal, the center of the empire’s naval production from the 16th century to 1922, when the empire was dissolved. It remained an active shipyard until the 1970s and, until recently, was abandoned. Beymen Tersane is part of a larger redevelopment of the area into a mixed-use waterfront district with hotels, cultural facilities, retail, and public spaces.

The luxury department store, which is just under 13,000 square feet, comprises a series of freestanding structures within the existing halls, articulated as a sequence of galleries with discrete material palettes and geometries. Beymen Tersane features a continuous horizontal layout rather than a multi- arrangement as is typical of department stores. The products, as well as contemporary art installations, are juxtaposed with the original structure, which remains visible throughout the space.

“Beymen Tersane brings together two longstanding interests of the office: shopping and preservation,” said Iyad Alsaka, partner at OMA. “The project reactivates a site whose significance for Istanbul is comparable to that of Venice’s Arsenale, opening a long-inaccessible part of the city to public life.”