Yalıkavak Palmarina

Yalıkavak is one of the lagoons on the South- Western coast of Turkey – a popular destination for voyages along the Turkish Riviera. Unlike its provincial center Bodrum, Yalikavak is a relatively calm, smaller scale settlement with a natural landscape. The project for the extension of the existing marina complex had the burden of welcoming a big investment in the area which brought its own facilities. The “island” part of the Marina houses retail, restaurants, beach-pool club, and the sanitary and mechanical units needed of mega-yachts to dock. The complex also includes a boutique hotel, customs office building, a spa and fitness center, an office building, storages and a shipyard for winter maintenance. The main motivation for the design was to search the possibility to reconcile the needs of ‘out-comers’ with the genius loci of Yalikavak as a Mediterranean settlement. Instead of a generic design that can easily become an alienated object for this place, an architecture derived from the local character (interpreted as composition of masses) while merging with the landscape and the sea as a way of becoming integrated with the context where only one material (travertine) is used to render the whole complex – regarding itself as a new-comer.