Letting the City Speak: Istanbul TV & Radio Tower

Letting the City Speak: Istanbul TV & Radio Tower

CTV Tower is a 396m tall, award-winning project, that you can see from almost every point of Istanbul. Shaped parametrically using wind data from the site, the tower’s form responds directly to environmental conditions. Beyond its technical performance, it has become a significant architectural element within Istanbul’s skyline, contributing a new vertical reference point to the urban silhouette.

Before our film, the project had been widely presented by architectural media and professionals, focusing on its parametric geometry, structural innovation in a formal language. However, when architect Melike Altınışık approached us, she emphasized that while the building had often been explained through design narratives, it had rarely been examined from the city’s perspective as a structure with Istanbul’s urban context.

For us, the brief became clear: this time, the city would narrate the building. We wanted to take a step back then frame the dialogue between the tower and the cityscape. Bringing Istanbul as an actor into the film was our main purpose. During the production we filmed the building in 7 different district of the city for three days.

The film opens with everyday scenes from Istanbul. The first frames do not center the tower; instead, they present daily urban life from the historic peninsula to the northern forest zones on the opposite side of the Bosphorus. The tower initially appears only as a distant, almost ambiguous figure within the skyline.

As the film progresses, the building gradually becomes more defined. Its scale shifts from a far silhouette contributing to the skyline to a close presence where its proportions and structural complexity can be fully understood. This gradual reveal allows the viewer to experience how the tower is perceived from different parts of the city, not as an isolated object, but as a spatial marker integrated into daily life.

By framing the project through urban perspective rather than architectural explanation, the film investigates how a contemporary building positions itself within a layered metropolis. The result is not a formal presentation of a building, but an exploration of its relationship with scale, distance, visibility, and the evolving complex identity of Istanbul’s urban fabric.