Once a functional “gas house” powering the city, the Gazhane today sits hollow, surrounded by the vivid cultural landscape of Beşiktaş — a district known for its fiercely passionate football fans and politically active citizenry. Rather than treating the site as a backdrop for nostalgia, the design positions the gasometer at the spatial and symbolic core of a new civic system. From this nucleus, the architecture unfolds outward in layered steps — the form grows centrifugally, transforming from a contained industrial ruin into an open and responsive public ground. The project introduces a terraced civic landscape that begins within the adjacent park and pours into the architecture, blending thresholds and erasing barriers. These terraces act as both topography and theater — allowing for picnics, rest, chanting, performances, and protest. Programs are stacked and interwoven: an amphitheater, a 360° panoramic exhibit, a fan museum, and a rooftop stage that captures Istanbul’s skyline while serving as a symbolic platform for public voice. The spatial strategy is deliberately layered — informal and spontaneous functions bleed into more formal interior spaces like an auditorium, archive, and research studios.

Materiality is critical to the project’s voice. Exposed brick, board-formed concrete, and raw steel are not aesthetic choices but carriers of memory — grounding the architecture in the site’s industrial past while allowing it to hold the weight of present emotion. These surfaces are meant to be inhabited, marked, sprayed, and remembered — echoing the visual language of Beşiktaş’s streets, where graffiti, slogans, and symbols are layered expressions of belonging. What this project revealed to me is that architecture is inherently political — not simply in what it says, but in whom it listens to and what it enables. Echoes After Whistle is not a monument; it is a responsive framework, shaped by the rituals of fans, the urgency of civic life, and the persistent memory of space. This was not just a project — it was a gesture of solidarity.