Design
Historically Responsible Decision of the Day: the Antakya Museum-Hotel
When life gives you a giant mosaic, build a museum-hotel.
Digging in the soil of Antakya, a small city near Turkey's Syrian border known to the Greeks as Antioch, Nehmi AsfuroÄŸlu discovered one of the world's largest and best-preserved ancient mosaics. It was an archaeologist's dream, but AsfuroÄŸlu is a developer, and he was hoping to build a hotel on the site.
He could have abandoned the project or concealed the discovery, but instead, he funded a seven-month excavation, abandoning the power tools of hotel construction for the manpower of historians from the local university. He hired architect Emre Arolat to design a museum-hotel complex on the site, preserving the floor beneath and creating a space to exhibit artifacts.