Beymen Tersane by OMA

Beymen Tersane, the department store designed by OMA for Turkish luxury retailer the Beymen Group, has been completed. Occupying a series of former shipbuilding halls within Istanbul's Haliç shipyard district, the project gives new life to a long-abandoned industrial structure that played a significant role in the city's history...

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From the architect: OMA's design introduces a series of freestanding structures within the existing halls, organizing the department store as a sequence of galleries with distinct geometries and materialities. Together, the galleries form a new layer within the former shipyard, displaying not only products but also contemporary art installations while allowing the original structure to remain visible. Traversed both along and across, the galleries form a continuous horizontal retail space that eliminates the hierarchy typically created by distributing departments across multiple floors.

Tersane-i Âmire was the Ottoman Imperial Arsenal and the center of the Empire’s naval production from the 16th century until the dissolution of the Empire in 1922. The shipyard complex remained operational until the 1970s, when shipbuilding shifted away from the Golden Horn. Following decades of abandonment, the site is now being redeveloped as a mixed-use waterfront district comprising hotels, cultural facilities, retail, public spaces, introducing a new connection between the city and the Golden Horn in a context where much of the waterfront remains inaccessible.

Beymen Tersane is OMA’s first completed project in Turkey. The Beymen Tersane design team included OMA Partner Iyad Alsaka, with Project Architect Anita Ernődi and Saskia Simon.

Iyad Alsaka, Partner at OMA: “Beymen Tersane brings together two longstanding interests of the office: shopping and preservation. The project reactivates a site whose significance for Istanbul is comparable to that of Venice’s Arsenale, opening a long-inaccessible part of the city to public life.”

Architect: OMA
Client: The Beymen Group
Location: Istanbul, Turkey
Year: 2026
Area: 12,000 sqm
Partners: Ellen van Loon, Iyad Alsaka
Project Architect: Anita Ernődi. MacAulay Brown, Dagna Dembiecka, Catalina Dumitru, Aleksandar Joksimovic, Edyta Milczarek, Saskia Simon, Koen Stockbroekx, Michele Zambetti
Local Architect: Bağımsız İşler Studio
Lighting Design: Har Hollands, ONOFF
Photography: Marco Cappelletti Studios