In my daytime life, I’m a pastor’s wife in Izmir, Turkey. We are in the middle of a huge building project where we are designing and renovating a building to create an outreach-ministry center. This week, when I visited its neighborhood, my friends and I discovered another curious project. On the street behind our new ministry center is a row of old Italian homes, from the Ottoman times (above)
According to Turkish law, as historical buildings, this row of houses has to be reconstructed to look as close to the original as possible–with the wood/stone appearance and the bay window upstairs, etc.
This(below) is the building our neighbors are working on. It’s going to be a cafe.
If you look closely, you’ll see that the original stone side walls remain in place. And around the original, they’ve placed a steel support frame. The foreman explained that the front will look just like the others on the row.
Making it to be aligned with the vision takes a lot of time and effort. Keeping the heart of the building while ensuring it is pleasant and safe is a time-consuming challenge.
I’m so impressed with the thickness of those steel pillars.
