In the historic Odunpazarı quarter of Eskişehir, the Odunpazarı Modern Museum (OMM), designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, answers how to add a contemporary museum to a historic timber fabric — with that fabric's own material and scale.

Odunpazarı, whose name comes from the timber trade, is an Ottoman quarter of narrow streets and bay-windowed wooden houses. Rather than placing a single large museum mass here, Kuma breaks the building into small volumes and clusters them to echo the irregular scale of the street. The facade is made of timber beams stacked on top of one another and offset to project back and forth — a direct reading of the stacked lumber and the wooden houses of the quarter. This offset stacking is at once a textured surface producing shade and depth and a means of breaking up the mass to a human scale.

Inside, in contrast to these small outer volumes, a timber-clad central atrium that widens upward links all the floors. Kuma's idea of the "locality of material" — deriving the building from the texture and traditional craft of its surroundings — here joins Turkey's timber heritage with Japanese wood tectonics. The Odunpazarı Modern Museum is thus a bridge building that reconciles contemporary architecture with the scale and material of the local context.