A series of stacking wooden volumes overlapped irregularly for the the new Odunpazari Modern Art Museum designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates. The Odunpazari Modern Art Museum, located in Odunpazari -a historic district of Eskişehir and also where the owner was born and raised, is now underconstruction and one of hotly-anticipated projects of acclaimed Japanese architect in Turkey.

Kengo Kuma designed a fully-wooden museum inspired by the threshold of newly developed urban area and small scale town scape of traditional Ottoman wooden houses. 

Encompassing a total of 3,582 square meters area, the museum partitions are designed and overlapped on top of each other irregularly to create unexpected and unique experiential- spatial situations by adapting them to street level of urban context.

The project aims to realize the owner’s ambition to promote Turkish art and to make cultural contribution to the city of Eskisehir. Eskisehir is known as university town where young population is large and the city has lively and active atmosphere.

''These wooden house, with cantilevered volume at upper level, were built in lines along the meandering small streets that makes the street scape and walk though experience quite unique and unexpected,'' said Kengo Kuma & Associates.

''We aim to reflect this street scape quality into the new architectural design of the museum that stands in the urban scale. Our design strategy is to make the volume in aggregation; stacking small boxes to create the urban scale architecture.''

''Stacked boxes at the street level is read in the scale of surrounding houses and it grows taller towards the center of the museum to stands in the urban scape that announces itself as new cultural landmark of the area.''

The stacked and interlocked boxes are designed in various sizes to create diverse scales of exhibition space inside. Boxes at the ground level offers opportunities for large scale art works and installation. The boxes get smaller at upper levels to exhibit smaller, intimate scale art works. 

The central atrium, composed with timber blocks, connects each level to let the natural light through skylight above.

The name of this area ''Odunpazari'' means ''wood market'' in Turkish. The exterior envelop of the museum is composed with timber in full extent signifying the history and memory of the place that used to function as market in trading wood.

The Odunpazari Modern Art Museum is underconstruction and completion date has not been announced yet by Kengo Kuma & Associates. 

All images © Kengo Kuma & Associates

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