With 10,500 square meters of usable space across five levels, the new Istanbul Modern building comprises large exhibition galleries, multifunctional spaces, dedicated zones for education, offices, and spaces for commercial activity.

The building is based on an 8.4 x 8.4-meter grid with steel-brace concrete columns designed to resist significant seismic events. The circular columns and round mechanical funnels form an architectural landscape at ground level. The round shapes of these structural elements soften the transition between light and shadow and create a bright and safe environment by removing the sharp division between light and dark.

A library, café, museum shop, information points, and educational workshop spaces are on the ground floor next to the main lobby. A transparent glass fence underneath the main volume of the building provides protected areas for an outdoor sculpture terrace as well as educational spaces for children. The public areas of the museum are connected by a wide central stairway, suspended in a large void in the center of the main lobby. From the ground floor lobby, the stairs provide access to a 156-seat auditorium on an underground mezzanine. Photography and pop-up galleries are located on the first floor, as are staff offices, education, and event rooms. The restaurant on the south façade has an outdoor terrace with views toward the sea.

All lobby spaces on the upper levels give visitors a view of both Tophane Park and the waters of the Bosphorus, maintaining a visual connection to the museum’s surroundings which also helps visitors orientate themselves within the building.

The second floor has 3,300 square meters of exhibition space that house permanent and temporary exhibition galleries. A staircase leads from the second-floor lobby to a glass lantern opening onto a 650-square-meter rooftop viewing terrace that hovers above a shallow plane of water spread across the entire roof. A metaphysical connection is created by the reflections of the city on both the water feature and the sea, which merge into one.