Like Father, Like Son

Murat Tabanlioglu.

As the sun beats down on the pool-side lounge on the ground floor of Emirates Towers, Murat Tabanlioglu lights another cigarette and looks at the skyline of Sheikh Zayed Road.

“It’s an interesting place,” he says, pausing for a second to exhale. “But for me it needs something else. All the buildings seem to be paying their own games. They are not playing together.”

As the son of acclaimed Turkish state architect Hayati Tabanlioglu, Murat has lived and breathed architecture since before he can remember. His father designed half of Istanbul, including the city’s airport and opera house, and since making Tabanlioglu Architects a father and son venture in 1990, Murat has continued that trend.

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His wife, Melkan, joined the firm in 1995, and together the duo have made their name with high-profile projects both in Istanbul and overseas. Most recently Tabanlioglu completed the tallest tower in Istanbul, the Sapphire Tower and the Astana Stadium in Kazakhstan, while their much-acclaimed Tripoli Congress Centre has won the firm multiple awards.

“It was never decided that I would be an architect. I think it came naturally,” says Tabanlioglu, reflecting on his career so far.

“This firm is now 50 years old, but we’ve never changed our direction. I think it is important that we are still speaking the same language. It’s a family business. If you look at Europe – Spain, Greece, Germany – family businesses are strong and in Turkey this is no different.”

It is a factor that Murat hopes bodes well for the firm in its most recent foray into the Gulf. A number of the firm’s projects were put on hold during the financial crisis, but with its recent fame in Libya, Murat hopes that now is the time to increase Tabanlioglu’s presence outside Turkey.

Not that this is the first time Tabanlioglu has expanded into a new market, the volume of Murat’s work in Kazakhstan is prolific, with the recently completed Astana Stadium a major coup for the firm. But Murat explains that his Tabanlioglu’s links to the central Asian nation began with an equally prolific project.

“I was invited five or six years ago to take part in a competition to make a pyramid in Astana, which they wanted to be biggest pyramid in the world. They invited two firms, us and Foster and Partners, and in the end we were asked to do the project together,” he says.

The result was the iconic Astana Opera House, and, as Murat explains, the opportunity to work with Norman Foster, a fellow modernist and one of the best-known contemporary architects in the world.

“It was interesting working with Foster. We have similar styles and he and his team are very good, I learnt a lot,” he says.

“I particularly learnt how to be both a good architect and a good businessman. That’s the difference. There are many star architects in the world but I think he is the only architect-businessman.”