S.O.S. Istanbul 2026: The Future of Harem Bus Station
Competition brief
S.O.S. İstanbul 2026: Harem Otogarının Geleceği asks students to rethink the future of Harem Bus Station in Üsküdar, on Istanbul’s Asian waterfront. The site remains in limited transport use. The challenge is to develop a public-purpose transformation that connects transport, open space, historic setting and neighbouring housing, while retaining low building density.
Entrants may retain, adapt or remove existing structures, but must explain those choices against the site’s memory and public value. The brief asks for scenarios at neighbourhood, district, Bosphorus and metropolitan scales, including how transformation could unfold in phases. It is a national, single-stage student ideas competition; no construction appointment is promised.
Organizer assessment
Istanbul Association of Architects in Private Practice (İstanbulSMD) organizes the competition with support from Istanbul Planning Agency (İPA). The association dates its establishment to 2002 and the S.O.S. series to 2005. The current brief, drawing templates, site files and published answers provide a traceable professional process. Previous built outcomes and prize-payment histories were not independently established in this review.
| Organizer | İstanbulSMD, supported by Istanbul Planning Agency (İPA). |
| Eligibility | Undergraduates at universities in Türkiye or northern Cyprus on 10 September 2026, including foreign students. Solo entrants/team representatives must study architecture. |
| Entry fee | Free. A site visit is not mandatory. |
| Registration deadline | 7 December 2026 — entry is made with project submission; no separate advance registration or participation approval is required. |
| Submission deadline | 7 December 2026 at 17:00 in the announcement. Indicative conversion: 14:00 UTC assuming Türkiye’s UTC+3; the document does not explicitly name a timezone. |
| Total prize fund | TRY 550,000 net, approximately USD 11,105, across three prizes and five equal mentions. |
Participation and delivery
| Teams | No maximum team size is stated in the Q&A. One project per team; no person may join multiple teams. Every member must meet the student-status rule. Jurors, advisers, rapporteurs and specified relatives, partners, employees and interns are excluded. |
| Boards | Up to five portrait A1 boards (594 × 841 mm), including one summary board. Use the supplied board template, north arrows and consistent plan orientation, graphical scales, a board-number diagram and anonymous entry code. |
| Drawings | Concept and urban-context diagrams; 1:500 site and ground-floor plans; selected 1:200 floor plans including the chosen ground-floor area; at least two perpendicular section silhouettes and two elevation silhouettes, from street and sea, at 1:500. |
| Spatial evidence | Furnished selected plans with room areas; total construction area noted on the site plan; an overall three-dimensional view and axonometric studies of shared/social spaces. Explain access, ecology, programme and phasing. |
| Report and language | Architectural explanation on the boards, maximum 500 words. The brief and templates are Turkish; acceptance of another submission language is not expressly stated and should be confirmed. |
| File limits | Summary board: one-page PDF, maximum 5 MB. Other boards: merged PDF, maximum 20 MB. Separate publicity visuals: compressed file, maximum 10 MB, with original-size PDF/JPEG material at 300 dpi. |
| Identity file | Team list; signed acceptance of competition conditions and team-representative payment; student certificate issued within the last month or a barcoded graduation document where applicable. Solo entrants also submit the forms. |
| Anonymity and method | Five-digit code with nonrepeating, nonsequential digits in filenames and on boards. Upload through the official competition page; email submissions are invalid. No identity marks on project boards or linked digital material. |
| Models and supplements | Model photographs are permitted; no physical model is required. Anonymous supporting digital presentations may be referenced by codes on the boards. |
| Site files and correction | The package supplies DWG, SketchUp, photographs, KMZ and other site information. The Q&A says use the “Yarışma Alanı” DWG layer and disregard “_YARISMA_SINIRI”. |
Eligibility depends on undergraduate status on 10 September 2026. Graduates who finished before that date and postgraduate-only applicants are ineligible; a subsequent graduation does not by itself exclude an otherwise eligible entrant. The countdown is indicative because the published 17:00 deadline does not expressly identify its timezone.
Prizes and timetable
| First / second / third | TRY 125,000 / 100,000 / 75,000; approximately USD 2,524 / 2,019 / 1,514. |
| Equal mentions | Five × TRY 50,000; approximately USD 1,010 each. |
| Payment and tax wording | The brief states net payment within 30 days after announcement of jury results, to the team representative. It does not give a separate tax breakdown. |
| Questions | Questions closed 5 October; answers published 12 October 2026. Read the published clarifications with the brief. |
| Results and exhibition | Results will appear through the organizer. Colloquium, awards and exhibition details are to be announced with the results. |
| Currency estimate | Calculated on 18 October 2026 from ECB reference rates dated 16 October: EUR 1 = USD 1.1253 = TRY 55.7328. Rounded equivalents are indicative; prizes are in lira. |
Jury
| Chair | Burcu Göksoy, architect. |
| Main panel | Merve Gedik, Pınar Kesim Aktaş, Uğur Onur, Cihan Sevindik, Ertuğ Uçar and Mert Üçer; all identified as architects in the brief. |
| Advisory panel | Kurtul Erkmen, association president; Ebru Ünver Karaer and Erhan Vural, board members; Dilgün Saklar, association member. |
| Substitutes and rapporteur | Yusuf Burak Dolu and Sinan Tuncer, substitute architects; Kübra Elif Durğun, architect and rapporteur. |
| Relevance and disclosure | The named architectural panel is relevant to spatial and urban design. The reviewed documents do not supply detailed individual biographies or a weighted scoring matrix; no specialist expertise beyond the stated roles is inferred. |
Rights and implementation
Participation grants permission for exhibition and competition-related publication of the submitted work. Entrants carry responsibility for plagiarism; team members are jointly responsible to the organizer. The reviewed clauses do not set out an exclusive transfer of copyright, a subsequent paid commission or an implementation commitment. Free entry removes a registration-payment refund issue, but no compensation for design-production costs or cancellation was identified.
✦ ArchUp Competition Review
The committee considers the brief substantive because it makes public access, low density, transport connections and staged change central to the design task. Its value lies in reasoning about a working urban place, rather than presenting an isolated waterfront object.
Free entry, supplied site information and published answers help students judge the workload. That workload is nevertheless significant: multi-scale planning, detailed selected plans and anonymous digital delivery require disciplined preparation. The unconfirmed timezone should be checked, and the freedom to propose removal or road changes should be understood as freedom within an ideas competition, not evidence of planning permission.
Related competitions — Editorial team selection
For complementary archive material, the William Gladstone School extension competition addresses additions to an existing institution, while the Eulsukdo ecological-art call explores landscape and public experience. These links are thematic references, not a statement of current entry availability.
Time remaining for submission
Indicative countdown: 7 December 2026, 14:00 UTC assumes the published 17:00 means UTC+3 in Türkiye. The organizer does not explicitly state a timezone. Confirm it and submit early. No separate preregistration is required.
Official brief and application
Consult the organiser’s brief and entry terms before registration.
