Of course Turkey can join the EU. Harvey Nicks has arrived! The city may be more famous for its old-skool approach to retail, charmingly split between shambolic street markets — festooned with live chickens and every kind of pot and pan — and that tourist’s spider’s web the Grand Bazaar. But with Harvey Nichols and its accompanying new megamall, Kanyon, Istanbul has fast-tracked two centuries to branded nirvana.
Inside Kanyon, in Istanbul’s northern business district, Levent, Harvey Nicks is accompanied by 170 other slinky, niche, high-class boutiques, deftly chosen to target the admittedly still slim demographic of Turks who read Wallpaper — “personally hand-picked,” says Markus Lehto, the managing director of Kanyon. “No, almost curated.” (Yes, he’s being sincere).
There’s Le Pain Quotidien, with its gentrified brioches, Mandarina Duck, Furla and Camper, a rooftop branch of London’s chic Chinese restaurant Hakkasan, plus smarter Turkish brands such as Ottoman Empire, purveyors of skinny T-shirts to Istanbul’s clubbers.
Istanbul got its first malls in the 1980s, a decade in which, as far as style goes, they’ve hitherto remained. With Kanyon, though, says Lehto, “it’s like going straight from black and white to digital plasma screens”, and that involves training its users in how to be modern, metrosexual consumers — “learning to walk into an Apple Store and play with an iPod. Learning to queue for Wagamama. Turks just aren’t used to that.”
But it’s not just the novelty brands that are causing the stir. The architecture is spectacular, designed, as its name suggests, as a deep canyon, open-air, arching round a bulging multiplex cinema at its heart and lined with four floors of stone-faced terraces, to mimic, says David Sheldon, of its architects, Jerde, the vigorous hills and ravines of the city’s geography.
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Its “building as landscape” and sensuous curves tick boxes for architectural fashion, knocking spots off any mall built in Turkey or, indeed, in Britain, and an example of the boom in “experiential malls” in America and the Far East, where quality of the experience counts as much as what’s sold inside. Kanyon has urban ambitions, says Sheldon, “a quality, mixed-use space” (there are posh flats and offices in high-rises above) that he hopes will catalyse Istanbul’s chaotic, creaking urban form.
“Istanbul in its Islamic heyday was a glorious urban experience, the gardens, the mosques, the fountains. Now if you’ve got money you get in a car and leave.”
Despite the ambitions, though, Kanyon remains, basically, a privatised mall for the right kind of citizen. Headscarves are thin on the ground. Shopping bags are not. Its architecture stays only just the right side of Disney: more could have been made of Jerde’s intentions to update Turkey’s traditions of public-private spaces, such as the bazaar, the kervansaray or the han, rather than import its fashionable form from Western computers. But it isn’t bad, and for a country where quality contemporary architecture is as absent as quality brands, that’s a minor miracle.
“Turkey has a limited history of modern architecture,” says Melkan Tabanlioglu, the head of one of the country’s foremost architectural firms and executive architects of Kanyon. “Maybe now it will change.”
In the 16th century the architect Sinan’s stunning mosques were cutting edge aesthetically and technologically, but by the 19th, the dog days of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey began importing inspiration from Europe. Kemal Ataturk’s secular revolution in the 1920s and 1930s found architectural form in Modernism, but from the 1950s the contemporary never really took flight in Turkey’s increasingly conservative cultural climate.
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“The outlook is bleak,” wrote Christa Beck and Christiane Fortsing in 1997 in Istanbul: An Architectural Guide. Istanbul’s population had ballooned tenfold to ten million, housed either in unplanned shanty towns or the richer, scantily planned suburbs of the north, where today the city’s stunning skyline of minarets is marred by abysmal high-rises in mirrored blue glass. The city’s heritage was being destroyed and its mostly 19th-century infrastructure was groaning.
Kanyon, though, marks the first salvo in the city’s incredible change since. A metro system has not only been built, but extended; new tramlines constructed; new roads and a tunnel under the Bosphorus begun, along with the “very slow liberalising of a volatile, short termist, Byzantine planning and development system,” says Lehto. In their wake, come the “beginnings, just the beginnings,” says Tabanlioglu, “of a demand for contemporary design”.
Tabanlioglu is hoovering up more than most — not only Kanyon but the city’s first modern-art gallery, Istanbul Modern, which opened 18 months ago in a 1950s concrete warehouse on the Bosphorus. Like Kanyon, it scores on fashion — the very image of a chic-brutal gentrified white cube — if not originality. “It’s enough that there’s modern architecture at all,” says Tabanlioglu.
Istanbul Modern’s founders, the Eczacibasi family — industrial magnates behind much of the city’s cultural life, such as the art biennale, and, indeed, Kanyon — shied away from a Frank Gehry or a Daniel Libeskind. Perhaps wisely. The advent of a modern-art gallery at all was innovation enough. But earlier this summer, on the Asian shore, the city took the ambitious step of awarding the masterplan of a vast new city waterfront extension near the new Grand Prix track at Kartal-Pendik to another top architect, Zaha Hadid. “Istanbul may look incredibly old,” says Hadid, “but with its complexity, its energy, its texture, its multicentred shape, it’s actually very modern, very in keeping with current discourses about the city.”
She has responded with an outline design for a new landscape as a characteristically languid, sprawling, morphing net, single-handedly yanking the city on a crammer course in urbanism, from medieval to post-postmodern. Her success put many native architects’ noses out of joint. But it’s a smart move if you want to get the city on the international map. And that in the end is what this is about, says Tabanlioglu: “Architecture is being used to show that Istanbul, that Turkey, has risen. It can’t stop. Europe is old news.”
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There’s no doubt that investment in the city is overdue. The danger is that the questioning of Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly vulnerable modernisation plans to court the EU, the biggest redefinition of Turkish identity since Ataturk, that’s taking place in, say, literature with Orhan Pamuk, or art with Kutlag Ataman, isn’t occurring within the city’s less sophisticated architecture and urbanism circles. For all its quality, Kanyon could be anywhere.
Perhaps Hadid’s plan will stimulate debate. Or perhaps it’s just the Trojan horse. Perhaps this is as good as it gets. Perhaps “liberalising” Istanbul’s cityscape just means real-estate speculation dressed up in its usual clothes of Esperanto style and consumerism, Istanbul just the latest easyJet bolt hole for Western tourists, a new Dubai.
I bet there’s a queue of developers gagging to nab that minaret-studded skyline, so full of eastern promise.