Çamlıca Tower

Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality opened an ideas competition for a broadcasting tower on Little Çamlıca Hill in 2011. The scheme that was eventually built took third prize, and in 2013 the then prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, decided it would be the one to go up. Its author, Melike Altınışık, had spent seven years at Zaha Hadid Architects before returning to Istanbul and opening her own office in 2013; this is that office’s first building. Construction began in late 2016 under a contract let by the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, the structure was topped out in September 2020 and the tower opened on 29 May 2021. It stands 369 metres tall, a reinforced-concrete shaft carrying a 168-metre steel mast, and its tip is 587 metres above sea level — the highest structure in Istanbul. The shaft is elliptical in plan and tapers as it climbs; the swelling near the top, which the architect describes as an unopened tulip bud, holds observation decks on the thirty-third and thirty-fourth floors and a restaurant on the thirty-ninth and fortieth. The contract was finally settled at US$121.7 million.