Beyond these tangible linguistic, political and cultural borders, there are also conceptual and philosophical constructs that frame Istanbul’s identity. The city defies simplistic categorisation and its relationship to modernity is unique. Following the birth of the republic, exactly 100 years ago, Turkey experienced a sudden and violent modernising revolution, the markers of which are still seen throughout the city. If the experience of modernity has been tumultuous for every society it has visited, in Turkey the jarring effects of this new vision of the future remain tangible still. Turkey’s history of modernisation is ultimately inseparable from periods of military rule and a concurrent contestation of westernisation in various form of Islamist politics. If European Orientalists imagined Istanbul as a gateway to an exotic East, modernisers in Turkey tend to regard it as the shop window of a Western-oriented conception of the country, fraught with the sense that the country might not be modern enough. For both, Istanbul is a confected tableau, arranged for external onlookers from East and West. Twenty years ago, the patrons of Istanbul Modern, Bülent and Oya Eczacıbaşı, had the idea to make the site of disused dockland warehouses into a museum for contemporary art, in the vein of Tate Modern. At the beginning, the location showed the family’s collection of art and the neighbouring buildings became the principal host of the Istanbul Biennale. As so often, this project sought to represent Turkish modern and contemporary art to an international audience through appeals to the language of the global art world. Thus it is no surprise that when, some 20 years later, they decided to reconstruct the museum as part of a wider commercial shoreside development plan, they invited Piano, architect of numerous museums, art spaces and cultural centres. His response was typically poetic: “This building is a flying vessel. It’s also very much part of the tradition of storage – this is why this building has a soul – when art becomes a museum, it gets out from under time, the dimension of time … solid and flying.” Istanbul Modern in that sense is a symbolic expression made concrete of a wish to somehow move forward; for that alone, it should be celebrated.

Museum-making everywhere is a communal act. It is not just that museums invite the possibility of communing with art, whatever that may mean at any given time, but they also, invariably, require active community participation. As Piano puts it, “Primary beauty is political, in a very deep sense. It’s about community. It’s about making the city a better place to be, and Istanbul deserves that. I like to do this also in Paris, in London, in New York, everywhere. I’ve done that in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago. But making it in Istanbul is quite interesting.”

What architecture brings to the table is also something of a melange, particularly by an architectural grandee such as Piano. His designs have a halo effect, an intangible magical quality like a glowing frame, that positions the building – and its uses – for decades to come. Think Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern, or I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre. This architecture is celebrated as a cultural artefact in itself and not simply as shelter or storage or a temple to art. The clearest proof of this is how easy it is to name the architects of the great museums in the Persian Gulf and beyond, while it remains so much harder to name the museums themselves.

That isn’t to say that the soft-spoken and almost saintly Piano should be bracketed with his sharp-tongued and sharper-elbowed designer-suited contemporaries and sometimes rivals. Piano belongs to an older generation with a more utopian vision of architecture, shaped more by 1968 than the egomania of the 1980s, and represents a much softer sell. He – along with his old friend, the late Richard Rogers – is one of a more authentic, artisanal class of technocrats, who are directly connected with an idea of civic virtue. As a result, they have also always had far less of an appetite for potentates and oligarchs, the embrace of whom has tainted the reputation of so many starchitects. As Piano sees it, “You understand architecture is about walking the street and talking to people – you understand it as a social job, a social art, a civic art, public art.”

Piano speaks very eloquently about the period of his formation in which architecture was tasked with offering solutions to the problems of civic society. Unfortunately, we are in a different age now, where architecture is seen by many to be part of the problem, not least by many architects themselves, if this year’s Venice Biennale is anything to go by. Piano claims that these concerns have entered his practice. “Everything done before the year 2000 was made without a clear understanding of the fragility of the planet,” he said in Istanbul. “Today, the new condition is that you have to make buildings that are wise. It’s a great opportunity, because we have to transform that duty, that necessity, into a poetic vision. You can make buildings that breathe. The building must express the fact that it’s a wise building.” It’s a philosophy writ large in the Istanbul project: “This building is not consuming energy, or very little energy. We have a one-metre space between the water and the roof. Today, you can make buildings very close to zero emission – right now, we are designing at least three or four buildings that are real zero emission.” Indeed, one of the most stunning aspects of the design is the shallow rooftop pool, almost invisibly blending with the Bosphorus, on which appears a vast crowd of seagulls, grateful to be taking a breather from the city's hectic pace.

Location, location, location. On these three accounts Istanbul is a winning destination for seagulls and architects alike. But Istanbul’s pitch isn’t just as a location and a geography, it is also civilisational and cultural. The city that looks with some benevolence at Piano as only its most recent interloper is, amongst other things, the city of Sinan (1491–1588), perhaps the greatest Islamic architect of all time, responsible for hundreds of extant buildings across the city. Sinan, who served as the empire’s chief architect from 1539 until his death in 1588, is responsible for the design of the city's icon, the Suleymaniye Mosque (1569-1575). The Suleymaniye was Sinan's attempt to surpass the achievement of Hagia Sophia, responding to the great Byzantine church with respect but also with ambition: to build bigger and better, in engineering terms, and in a fraction of the time. It achieves all of the above and delivers both grandeur and delicate touch – essential qualities from the point of view of Islamic tradition. Sinan’s masterpiece shows how Islam sees itself not in opposition to Christianity but as its continuation.

Istanbul Modern’s 9th collection exhibition, “Floating Islands”, brings together more than 280 works by 110 artists and 2 artist duos. Photo by Cemal Emden. Image courtesy of Istanbul Modern

By the standards of the recent rash of new museums across the world, Istanbul Modern is a very modest proposal, an elegant but humble and practical design solution at a very reasonable budget. It has none of the bling and expressive pretensions of those built recently in Dubai, Baku or Abu Dhabi. In fact, its greatest achievement isn’t to stand out too much – the building already looks very comfortable in situ. It acts as an understated vitrine on the Bosphorus, ready to frame the content it is offered. It may be too early to judge it by the current programming. A revealing sign of the challenges of the curatorial approach at Istanbul Modern was prominently adding the location of each artist’s educational institution next to their name and work, emphasising the almost total extent to which contemporary Turkish artists have been educated in the West. What might have felt like a badge of honour to some, to me seemed provincial. It is a telling reminder of how the museum itself conceptualises its own audience.

Ultimately, it feels as though Istanbul Modern, in reaching to meet the challenge set by its name, looks to other international blueprints for what it ought to be as an institution, rather than reflecting on how modernity is experienced in Turkish terms. Istanbul Modern could perhaps be more richly inspired if it took time to look at itself, Istanbul’s own reality and identity, for the meaning the city uniquely generates. An identity rooted in that place, in the riot of cultures there – even the culture of riots – and the history of its own role as a central civilisational force, in a rapidly changing world of many modernisms. Neither a gateway to this or that continent, nor a precipice, teetering on a crisis of identity; surely it has both the potential and the provenance to do so. ◉