SO? Architecture and Ideas

When Sevince Bayrak and Oral Göktaş founded SO? in 2007 in Istanbul, the city was rapidly gaining popularity on the international scene fueled by a construction boom. When SO? secured its first research project in 2009, Istanbul was chosen as the host for one of the most important events in urbanism, Urban Age. A couple of years later, in 2013, the Young Architects Program by MoMA PS1 took place in Istanbul for the first time, and SO? emerged as the winner of the competition. In 2015, their installation depicting public life in Istanbul was acquired for the permanent collection of the MAXXI Museum, coinciding with a tumultuous period in Istanbul marked by riots, conflicts, and rapid development. It was the 20th anniversary of the big earthquake in Marmara when their project on post-earthquake housing was exhibited in Denmark, the UK, France, and Italy. In 2019, a few months after the opening of their first large-scale public project, the city underwent a change in administration after 20 years of being ruled by the same party. In 2021, they transformed a private swimming pool built for the residential use of former mayors, into a public event hall at the request of the new local government. In 2023, amidst an economic crisis and the aftermath of earthquakes, they wrote a theory on reusing existing buildings, inspired by the pool project, exhibiting it at the Venice Architecture Biennale.