Large scale at human scale: Adress Esenkent

Adress Esenkent is the studio's largest work to date: 32,000 m² in Esenyurt, 210 units, and a project team of four. In this conversation we spoke with Seyyit Taha Topçuoğlu, one of the project leads, about scale.

"In large projects the real risk is not the building growing — it is the decisions growing," says Topçuoğlu. "If a single line carries 210 flats, you must think 210 times while drawing it. That is why we built the project not as one large building but as the sum of small moments."

The composition has three layers: a commercial base along the avenue, residential towers above, and a series of landscaped courtyards between. The courtyards are the breathing voids of the 210-unit program — between every resident's door and their street stands an in-between space at human scale.

With concept, permitting and construction running in parallel, the distance between site and desk shortened too: "Every decision made on site is drawn in the same week. At large scale, a late revision is two hundred and ten times a small-scale mistake."

At the end we ask for the secret of scale. The answer is short: "Look from the pavement. If the building reads well from there, the zeros in the plan stop mattering."