Category: Cultural
Type: Museum
Location: Firuzağa, Hüseyin Ağa Bahçe St. Beyoğlu
Date: 19th Century
Period: Ottoman Empire
Designer: Unknown
Photos: The Museum of Innocence
The Museum of Innocence, located in the historic Çukurcuma neighborhood of Beyoğlu, Istanbul, is a unique cultural institution housed within a late nineteenth-century building originally known as the Brukner Apartment. Reflecting the typical adjacent building typology born out of Istanbul’s early modernization period, this corner structure stands on a tight fifty-square-meter footprint but benefits from three light-receiving facades. In the late 1990s, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk purchased the building to physically manifest the domestic universe of his 2008 novel of the same name, collaborating with architects Ihsan Bilgin, Cem Yucel, and Gregor Sunder-Plassmann to transform the residential space into a contemporary museum. The conceptual restoration, officially completed and opened to the public in 2012, completely hollowed out the interior while preserving the historic exterior shell. By restructuring the internal wooden frame into a light-filled vertical void with pedestrian bridges, the design successfully honors the original structural layout while creating a fluid, ceremonial exhibition path for the eclectic collection of daily artifacts that document the mid-to-late twentieth-century social history of Istanbul.
