Odunpazarı Modern Museum

Kengo Kuma-designed contemporary art museum, opened 2019

The Odunpazarı Modern Museum opened in 2019 as the gift of Erol Tabanca to his home city, and it has become Eskişehir's signature building. Kengo Kuma's design stacks rectangular timber boxes at offset angles, echoing the wooden Ottoman houses of the surrounding quarter. The interior is bright, calm, and tightly proportioned, with a top-lit central atrium and three floors of galleries.

The collection focuses on Turkish modern and contemporary art from the 1950s onward, with rotating exhibitions of international names. Even if contemporary art is not your thing, the building alone is worth the visit. Open Tuesday to Sunday; small cafe and shop on the ground floor.

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A story
The museum is built around the personal collection of Erol Tabanca, a Turkish architect-developer who grew up in Eskişehir and gave the city the museum essentially as a homecoming gift. The building's stacked timber blocks are a direct reference to the wooden houses around it, scaled up to museum size — Kengo Kuma's first major project in Turkey.