Yalıkavak Palmarina | Emre Arolat Architects

Yalikavak is one of the lagoons on the southwestern coast of Turkey, which is becoming a popular destination for blue voyages along the Turkish Riviera. Unlike its provincial center Bodrum, which has faced a building boom in 1980s with the increase of touristic activities, Yalikavak is still a relatively calm, smaller scale settlement with its natural landscape.
The project for the extension of the existing marina complex for the use of middle-upper class in Yalikavak has the burden of welcoming a big investment in this area that will also bring its own facilities. The “island” part of Yalikavak Marina, which is the first phase of the complex, is planned to house restaurants, swimming pools, sanitary and mechanical units for needs of megayachts that will dock in the marina. The main motivation for the design of the “island” was to search for the possibility to reconcile the needs of ‘outcomers’ 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 with different heights, merging with landscape and with the sea has emerged as a way to be integrated with the place. Alongside the masses that follows a gridal structure in plan, atypical additions such as a lineer wall and a tower accompanies the complex. Following the ancient cities like Kos, Rhodes and Siena, cladded with one material, travertine is used to render the whole complex which is regarding itself as a new-comer, but one of a familiar, not a hard-shell foreigner.