The award-winning centrepiece to Istanbul’s flagship Apple store requiring a highly sophisticated design to achieve its apparent simplicity.
2014 IStructE Supreme Award for Structural Engineering Excellence
2014 IStructE Award for Retail or Commercial Structures
For the architect and engineer it is the distillation of a desire to achieve the ultimate and simplest solution. The architectural form of the Zorlu Lantern is a result of the purest structural approach possible given the limits of material fabrication today.
The solution is single panels of glass for the walls and a single element for the roof, all held together with silicone – no fixings to mar their integrity and transparency.
The journey to this solution explored many ideas, the design team continuing to strive for the best result in terms of architecture, engineering, urbanism, and function.
The four glass walls are 10 metres wide and three metres tall, formed of 3 x 12 millimetre fully tempered glass laminated with Sentry Glass interlayer. The roof is a single Carbon Fibre Reinforced Plastic (CRFP) panel with a complex ‘precambered’ shape to ensure the soffit is completely level thoughout when installed. The external form rises to 210 millimetres in the centre to facilitate water run-off. It is a constant 60 millimetres at the edges where it meets the wall panels
Located right at the heart of the Zorlu complex, the lantern acts as a visual signpost to the store and lets daylight into the basement flagship Apple store; it also illuminates the plaza at night.
© Eckersley O’Callaghan 2024
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