Ankara Office Tower  | Ankara, Turkey | 2017

Architects: Anmahian Winton Architects
Architects of Record: RGGA Architects
Client: Dolphin Overseas Fund, LLC.
Project Management: BHP International – Barnard Howell Partnership
General Contractor: Tepe-Tesan Joint Venture ; AECOM
Structural Engineers: Richmond So Engineering
Landscape Architects: Stoss
Photographers: Florian Holzherr

The Ankara Office Tower is a fourteen-story office building in Ankara, Turkey, serving high tech companies engaging with leading universities and research institutes in the nation’s capital.

Urbanistically, the project plays an important role in a developing area west of Ankara’s old city center, connecting residential neighborhoods, a transit corridor, and a band of commercial development that was obstructing integration of these districts into a lively, energized community of residents, workers, and visitors.

In response, the building is pulled back from the highway, making space for a bamboo grove that links residential areas to public transportation, enhances the experience of passage, and buffers a publicly accessible urban garden.

The Tower is distinguished from its surroundings by clarity of expression: a simple, geometric, glass volume encasing a stack of horizontal louvers set in a lush landscape. Its eccentrically organized core within the narrow building footprint and its unusually high ceilings create generous spaces with unobstructed views of the city, allowing natural light to penetrate deep into the building.

Design of the ground floor develops visually layered public spaces whose scale, enclosure, and use of light reference regional culture.

Flanking the building is a café and gathering space open to local residents as well as building occupants. Its glass walls are surrounded by densely planted bamboo, an extension of the urban garden, that filters light and that is itself surrounded by a full-height, GFRC latticework enclosure.

This series of screens establishes the café as a shared yet intimate precinct that creates privacy and guides views.

Additionally, hundreds of small, pendant fixtures in the lobby establish a virtual ceiling that both enhances human-scale interactions and celebrates the space’s monumental qualities.

Solar gain is controlled with variable-section, horizontal exterior mullions, calibrated to minimize heat gain during summer months and optimize it during winter months. Interior wood louvers integral to the curtain wall—mechanically operated but with manual overrides—give tenants individual daylight control within their workspace.

Their purpose is both practical and perceptual: they mitigate glare while admitting indirect light and maintaining views, and enhance building occupants’ daily experience by introducing wood, a warm, textural material, to the office environment.

The Tower’s kinetic cladding anchors an architectural aesthetic for this rapidly growing area of the city, reflecting client objectives to create a new market of design-driven office space and satisfying workplace preferences of a demanding tenant cohort.

Moreover, the assembly delivers an environmentally responsive solution to programmatic needs, meeting operational goals efficiently and sustainably: reducing heat loads, energy use, and reliance on mechanical ventilation. In addition, the project reduces heat island effect by limiting surface parking and installing an intensive green roof system over subterranean parking areas.

And the bamboo grove surrounding the site further mitigates heat gain from hardscaped sidewalks, walkways, and the maintenance drive.

The outcome is a building whose stacked, repetitive facade system emphasizes its proportions and gives it stature among its taller neighbors.

Over the course of the day and as one moves around the Tower, its innovative curtain wall produces a transformative effect. Sculptural exterior mullions wrapping the building create different patterns, depending on the sun’s position and the pedestrian’s perspective.

As wood louvers open or close according to interior needs, the Ankara Office Tower itself appears either permeable or reflective, revealing patterns of use and activity within.