ACity Mall

About The Entry

ACity Mall is a large-scale retail complex in Ankara, Turkey, encompassing a full facade renovation of the existing building and the design of a new extension block. The project confronts one of the central challenges of contemporary retail architecture: how to give a city-scaled commercial complex a coherent, memorable identity without resorting to the visual noise of conventional signage-driven facades.

The design responds with a single, unifying material gesture. A perforated metal panel system in warm copper and bronze tones wraps the entire 300 metre frontage, binding old and new into one continuous skin. The perforation pattern, an irregular scatter of rectangular voids, is drawn from an abstraction of urban density: the city grid dissolved into texture. During daylight hours the panels shift from deep amber to burnished gold as the sun moves across the building. At night, the effect reverses light escapes through the perforations and the facade becomes luminous, animating the surrounding streetscape from within.

Embedded into this skin, at street level, are the tenant identity fins: tall blade elements that carry brand names perpendicular to the facade in bold letterforms. These fins are not applied signage they emerge from the architectural structure itself. Commerce is turned into form; programme becomes material.

The new extension block introduces a fourth floor, a rooftop terrace with planted edges, and a glazed crown that marks the building's upper programme from the street. Its facade employs a finer-mesh iteration of the copper language — a dense grid of metallic louvres that filters sunlight on south and east elevations while maintaining visual transparency.

Between the two volumes, a covered urban passage connects both sides of the site, creating a public shortcut through the block. This threshold activates both facing elevations, introduces a moment of spatial compression within an expansive building, and returns a fragment of the city to the pedestrian.

ACity does not simply contain retail it becomes part of the urban fabric, a structure that changes with the light, engages the street at every scale, and turns the logic of commerce into architectural language