“Plain buildings that prefer to stay in the background rather than standing out.” Such are the words that describe award-winning Emre Arolat’s projects.

Emre Arolat is a young Turkish architect. Forty-one years old, he is the winner of the Fourth Annual National Architecture award, and the head of a bureau that is engaged in a wide range of activities in Turkey and abroad and dedicated to giving young architecture graduates a chance. He also teaches in the School of Architecture of Istanbul’s Yildiz Technical University. Arolat, who believes that architecture is gradually becoming anonymous in this age of information, thinks that the architect though anonymous nevertheless needs to be original. He has adopted a concept of architecture in which ‘things don’t appear to be something else’, an architecture which is ‘sincere and not laden with indirect messages’. And naturally he prefers to stay quite deliberately in the background. We discussed with him his concept of architecture and his projects both current and past.