COLOSSUS HOTEL
Bodrum/Muğla ︎ 1992 ︎ Construction Area: 2.700 m2 ︎ Site: 3.000 m2 ︎ Hospitality ︎Ender Özışık, Hüseyin Önder, Gökhan Avcıoğlu, Nevzat Sayın, Niko Tzannis Ginnerup








The superficiality often associated with tourism suggests that nothing truly "authentic" can be created in this field. Exaggeration, unnecessary elegance, and temporariness lead us far from a sense of authenticity. Designing a hotel in Bodrum was a good opportunity to tackle these issues. The design was developed to achieve high-standard service with small-scale support as a family-run business. Rooms and other spaces surrounding an inner courtyard seemed like the best way to ensure accessibility and the ability to do many things at once.
The state of the surrounding buildings and the lack of anything worth seeing reinforced the preference for an introverted structure. In an environment where construction habits are too inadequate to achieve a good structure, tourism regions are very problematic places because of the rush to be ready for the season. While looking for ways to supervise a distant construction site, we decided to build the structure with aerated concrete blocks and using the load-bearing wall technique. The dimensions calculated with the block length would minimise the margin of error, and and the load-bearing technique would ensure the structure remained as built. Today, many years later, we can say that the assumptions have come true. Much later, we saw a photograph of an old inn on an old Bodrum postcard, a structure we can no longer see because it is now surrounded by other buildings. There was more than just a resemblance...