Yalin Turns 13 Imitation Houses Into Konya's Bicycle Museum

The Bicycle Museum in Konya, Türkiye, opened on February 16, 2026 inside a complex of 13 reinforced-concrete buildings that few people loved — and that's exactly the point. Yalin Architectural Design, led by lead architect Ömer Selcuk Baz, transformed the 7,500-square-meter Konya Square Houses into a mixed cultural and commercial district rather than demolishing it.

The backstory matters here. The original buildings went up in 2005, drawing on the traditional Konya houses and neighborhood fabric that had stood on the site until 1955. As the architects put it, the complex reflects "a recurring tendency in Turkish architectural practice: reproducing historical morphology through concrete imitation." In other words, concrete pretending to be historic timber. Over the years, the buildings housed NGOs and municipal departments, but their relationship with the surrounding city stayed weak.

What was the design problem?

Konya Metropolitan Municipality approached the firm with a clear goal: reconnect the area to everyday urban life. The difficulty was doing that while acknowledging buildings the architects themselves describe as imitative — and while respecting the protected heritage structures around the site.

Their answer was addition, not subtraction. "Our fundamental strategy was not simply to preserve the existing structures, but to treat their presence as an opportunity," the firm explains. Through precisely positioned timber-frame additions, the team rebuilt what the concrete block had erased: "the spatial pattern, the street, the in-between spaces, and the square — in other words, public life itself."

The material choice is deliberate. Against the "traditional-looking" concrete buildings, the architects introduced authentic timber-frame structures to reinforce the urban pattern — a contrast that makes the layers of history legible rather than blurring them.

How does the museum work?

The largest addition serves the Bicycle Museum, where three originally separate buildings are connected by a timber-frame stair and elevator core. The result, according to the architects, is "a fragmented yet unified system with clearly defined entrances, exits, and vertical circulation."

The museum covers ground that's local common knowledge but barely known beyond the city: cycling culture in Konya has evolved continuously since the 1920s. The permanent exhibition presents the history of the bicycle, its components, and the development of cycling culture in the city, using analog and interactive systems supported by digital content.

The wider program fills out the site with commercial units, food and beverage venues, craft spaces, and workshops — a density and distribution the team arrived at through a series of design studies rather than a single fixed brief.

Why 2026 is the right year

The timing isn't accidental. In the same year the museum opened, the European Capitals and Cities of Sport Federation (ACES Europe) named Konya the "2026 European Capital of Cycling." The architects describe the museum as a place of memory that makes the city's century-old cycling tradition, sports infrastructure, and sustainable-mobility vision visible — while adding a new attraction for national and international visitors.

The firm frames the whole project as adaptive reuse and up-cycling: transforming the existing fabric instead of demolishing and rebuilding, and layering traces of the past through a contemporary tectonic language. Asmaz served as manufacturer on the project, completed in 2026.

For a city that just claimed the cycling-capital title, the project now has to prove it can hold a crowd — and give a second life to buildings that spent two decades looking backward.