Ancient Modern

A contemporary project by Emre Arolat takes a bold approach to historic preservation by suspending a 21st-century hotel over the ruins of a late-Roman metropolis.

- A.J.P. Artemel​​​​​​​

The urban surfaces we walk on, planed sidewalks cleared of debris or asphalt streets kept in good repair, are simply the topmost layers of human-churned earth extending sometimes hundreds of feet belowground. In some cities, digging downward exposes dense infrastructure networks, while in others—Antakya, Turkey, for one—construction workers can’t turn over a rock without uncovering priceless relics. The newly opened Antakya Museum Hotel, designed by the firm EAA–Emre Arolat Architecture, has turned one such discovery into a bold new strategy for historic preservation.

Catering mostly to tourists, including pilgrims to Saint Peter’s Church on nearby Mount Starius, which some claim housed the first Christian congregation, the 199-room hotel seems to hover above the ground. Its prefabricated guest rooms are arrayed like shipping containers beneath a flat, razorlike roof that slices into views of the surrounding mountains. But on closer approach the solid ground gives way to a subterranean landscape of rubbled streets, walls, and ancient mosaics, among the largest in the world.

This stone labyrinth is a section of late-Roman Antioch, a particularly multicultural corner of the Mediterranean during antiquity, where Latin, Greek, and Aramaic speakers traded gold, spices, and religions. Exposing the ruined urban fabric’s wide footprint impels one to imagine a metropolis beneath the contemporary city of about 210,000: Under every house, school, and store lies its 2,000-year-old counterpart.