Earlier this week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan showed the world his new "Ak Saray" ("White Palace"), a sprawling, ridiculously lavish compound that has 40 times the floor space of the more familiar White House. The roughly 2,150,000-square-foot complex cost a reported $350M to build, which unsurprisingly has a lot of people in the country criticizing the leader's autocratic ways. Erdogan, who will be moving out of the more modest two-story palace built by the first Turkish president in the 1920s, insists that this change symbolizes a "New Turkey" under his leadership.
UPDATE: it actually cost much, much more.
Of course, the symbolic shift is also supposed to manifest in the design of the 1,000-room building. As Ergodan said himself, "We paid attention to Ottoman themes in the interior, also adding elements reflecting the modern world." Those modern elements concern things like a foyer lined with trees and otherworldly orange lights.
· Turkey's new presidential palace unveiled - in pictures [The Guardian]
· All Presidential Pads posts [Curbed National]
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