Emre Arolat Architecture has completed a hotel in Antioch, Turkey, featuring prefabricated rooms that are suspended from an enormous steel frame above an important archaeological site.
The project, which is shortlisted in the hospitality building category of Dezeen Awards 2021, began in 2009 when the developer of the 34,000-square-metre site commenced work on the foundations for a planned luxury hotel.
Emre Arolat Architecture has built a hotel above an archaeological site in Turkey
During the excavations a significant archaeological find was unearthed, including artefacts belonging to 13 different civilisations as well as the world's largest in-situ mosaic.
The developer was keen to progress with the completion of the hotel, but Turkey's Cultural and National Assets Protection Board decreed that a scientific archaeological excavation was required. The Museum Hotel Antakya is suspended above the ground
The original plans for the five-star hotel were scrapped and Emre Arolat Architecture was asked to develop a new proposal that could be built without disturbing the ancient structures.
"The tension between the significance of archeological findings, their restrictions and hotel's strict programmatic codes was the main determinant that constituted the contextual and physical frame of the project," said EAA.
"This strain subverted the conventional hotel typology and put forward the idea of integrating a public museum that would exhibit the restored archeological ...