Yalikavak is a lagoon on the southwestern coast of Turkey. Unlike its provincial center Bodrum, which has faced a building boom in 1980s with the increase of touristic activities, Yalikavak is still a relatively calm, smaller scale settlement with its natural landscape.
The project for the extension of the existing marina complex for the middle-upper class in Yalikavak has the burden of welcoming big investments that will also bring its own facilities. The island part of Yalikavak Marina, the first phase has been planned to house retail, restaurants, beach-pool club, sanitary and mechanical units needed for megayachts that will dock here. The main motivation for the design of the island was to search for the possibility to reconcile the needs of outcomers with genius loci of Yalikavak as a Mediterranean settlement. An architecture derived from the local character, interpreted as composition of masses with different heights, merging with landscape has emerged as a way to be integrated with the place. Alongside masses following a gridal structure, atypical additions such as a lineer wall and a tower accompanies the complex. Following the ancient cities like Kos, Rhodes and Siena, cladded with one material, travertine is used to render the whole complex which is regarded as a new-comer, but one of a familiar, not a hard-shell foreigner.
At the second and third phases, shopping units are designed along the shore of the marina, continuing the Mediterranean aura with wide overhangs creating a continuous shaded path, that turns into a colonnade alongside the shops. All the shops are fragmented in planning and overhangs are designed in different levels overlapping each other in order to keep the building scale. The complex also includes a boutique hotel, customs office building, a spa and fitness, an office building, storages and a shipyard for winter maintenance.