Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
INTERIORS-DESIGN ARCHITECTURE CULTURE, cilt.3, sa.3, ss.181-202, 2012 (AHCI)
Designed and built in the late 1950s-early 1960s, the Grand Efes Hotel in Izmir became both an architectural legacy, tracing distinctive marks of the International Style in Turkey, and a cultural icon, being an integral part of Izmir city life as well as constructing the collective memory of Izmir's city-dwellers. After forty years of active use, its owner decided to remodel the hotel, and the remodeling began in 2006. The hotel reopened in 2008, renamed as the Swissotel Grand Efes, and resumed its role within the daily city life of Izmir. The scope of this study will deal with the issue of remodeling this building within Turkey's modern heritage. It will concentrate on the inevitable distortion of the hotel's spatial and cultural values through the remodeling process, materialized as an intervention to the interior that combines a unique local character with the architectural characteristics of the International Style. Within this framework, the main focus of this study is the analysis of the tension between the transformation and preservation of this historical building.