In 1993, the owners of HADOSAN, Mr.Münir and Fehmi Yazıcıoğlu commissioned the architect Atilla Yücel to undertake the design of a large carpet and handicraft centre at Ürgüp town, province of Nevşehir, Turkey. HADOSAN was a local firm having a significant experience in national tourism and carpet market, Cappadocia being an important centre of these activities.

The carpet and handicraft centres in Turkey have generally consisted of small size establishments and located in modest architectural settings. However, starting from the nineties some larger scale and more pretentious centres were also realized and HADOSAN aimed at joining this new trend.

The program requisites as well as the brief were defined after a careful analysis of the activities of the sector. They consisted of a series of independent “lecture rooms and exhibit areas”, completely air-conditioned, together with common spaces such as carpet manufacture workshops, large exhibition spaces, a small ethnographic museum and finally recreational, administrative and technical facility spaces.

These program requisites as well as the exceptional townscape and architectural heritage of Ürgüp, the hot and arid climate of the region and finally the imposing scale of the program vis a vis the impressive morphology of the historic and natural setting of the town have constituted the most significant design criteria. Other important design data were the intentions of the client to develop, starting from this first centre, a larger complex of training and production workshops, recreational units, craftsmen housing, and to constitute a kind of an arts and crafts village. Finally, the fully artificially illuminated and completely air-conditioned spaces required for such an activity as well as the dimensional requisites of the main space units were important criteria for the design decisions relating to the use of adequate technology.

The outcome of the architectural interpretation of all these factors has produced a piecemeal volumetric organization consisting of five pavilions surrounding an inner courtyard space. The combination of large and small scale volumetric units and spaces enables the addition of new pavilions and confers an unfinished/open morphologic character.

Besides the modern building techniques and  systems such as the reinforced concrete basic structure, or the sophisticated mechanical and electronic control systems, the use of local stone for cladding of surfaces; the overall architectural vocabulary, geometry, the use of light and shade on the surfaces and in volumetry constitute an attempt to create a symbiotic relation between the program needs, the monumental scale of the intervention and the very exceptional local context.

A final an important intention in this design has been to achieve an exemplary realization within the proliferation of bad quality architectures such as the neighboring housing developments and touristic buildings of the region, as well as the architecture of the existing examples of new carpet centres.

Hadosan Carpet and Handcrafts Center has undergone a major remodelling especially around the courtyard in 2004. This job was also undertaken by MArS-Architects.

Design Team (Original Building): Atilla Yücel Project Team (Original Building): Meltem Nalbantoğlu Design Team (Remodelling): Cem Yücel, Atilla Yücel