Snøhetta, MVRDV and BIG Design Istanbul’s Ion Riva Master Plan

The Ion Riva Master Plan is a landscape-led urban development taking shape along the Black Sea coast in Istanbul’s Beykoz district, designed by an international team that includes Snøhetta, MVRDV, and Bjarke Ingels Group. Covering roughly 84 hectares, the project integrates housing, cultural facilities, and ecological infrastructure into a coherent coastal neighborhood planned for around 3,000 residents.

What Is the Ion Riva Master Plan?

The Ion Riva master plan is one of Istanbul’s most ambitious contemporary urban projects, located in the Riva area of Beykoz along the city’s northern Black Sea shoreline. The development sits at a unique ecological threshold where forest, river, and sea converge, and the design team has built the entire master plan around that natural condition rather than overwriting it.

The project brings together three internationally recognized architecture studios, Snøhetta, MVRDV, and Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), alongside local practices KEYM, DB Architects, Rasa, and Bilgin Architects. Each international studio is responsible for a defined district within the master plan and for one signature cultural building that will serve as a civic anchor within that area.

The first phase has received planning permission and is currently under construction. It will deliver 969 homes, with the first residents expected to move in by June 2027. The residential units are primarily villas organized around internal courtyards, drawing on architectural traditions common to the wider region while offering 26 different courtyard configurations for layout variation. Shared amenities within each residential cluster include communal gathering spaces and swimming pools.

Snøhetta’s Greenhouse District and The Ring

Snøhetta is responsible for the Greenhouse district, which encompasses approximately 400 residences along with retail spaces and offices. The homes are organized into five smaller communities of 50 to 80 units each, with each cluster shaped by its specific relationship to the landscape around it. All residences prioritize layered connections to nature and to the wider community.

The defining architectural gesture within Snøhetta’s zone is The Ring, a circular elevated structure that spans a river gorge and creates a dramatic floating effect over the valley. The Ring functions as a community hub focused on ecological learning, cultivation, and everyday social encounter. Nearby stables and allotments support local food systems and environmental education, giving the building a living agricultural relationship with its surroundings.

The Ring is conceived not as a conventional community center but as what Snøhetta Senior Architect and Project Leader Tae-Young Yoon described as a “built fight of imagination,” a structure from which residents can look out at the site, experience it directly, and eventually grow into it. The building’s circular geometry is also structural: it spans the valley in a perfect circle, making the river itself a central organizing feature of the building’s experience. For more on Snøhetta’s approach to cultural landmarks and waterfront design, see our coverage of the Busan Opera House by Snøhetta and the Shanghai Grand Opera House by Snøhetta.

BIG’s The Drop: Where Coastline Meets Architecture

Bjarke Ingels Group has designed The Drop for Ion Riva, a teardrop-shaped timber structure positioned along the Black Sea shoreline. The building houses a café, restaurant, wellness spaces, and areas for public art. Its form is not merely sculptural; the shape is calibrated to frame views of the coastline and to create a structure that people move through with a strong awareness of the sea, the wind, and the light.

BIG partner Hanna Johansson described the ambition behind The Drop as making “the landscape and the coastline do as much of the work as the architecture,” a principle consistent with BIG’s broader body of work where program and landform are treated as inseparable. The building sits at the edge of the development, where the controlled environment of the neighborhood opens onto the raw drama of the Black Sea coast.

The use of timber as the primary structural and cladding material for The Drop is both an aesthetic and sustainability choice. Cross-laminated timber is a renewable material with a significantly lower carbon footprint than concrete or steel, and its use here connects The Drop’s form to the forested landscape visible from the site. Ion Riva’s buildings across the entire development will use a predominantly natural material palette including local stone and cross-laminated timber, which also supports the project’s on-site renewable energy strategy that includes solar panels throughout the district. For an overview of MVRDV’s broader architectural output, see our article on Top 5 Projects of MVRDV Office.

MVRDV’s The Lantern: A Cultural Hub with a Public Roof

MVRDV is the architect of The Lantern, the master plan’s third major cultural building. The structure contains a performing arts center and gallery alongside cinema rooms, a bookshop, and other community spaces. Its geometric volume will have a red finish and an accessible rooftop designed as public space, offering views across the natural landscape to the sea and the surrounding valley.

MVRDV partner Fokke Moerel articulated the guiding intention clearly: “We wanted to create a cultural space at Ion Riva that feels open, accessible and genuinely shared.” The rooftop is not an incidental amenity but a defining part of the building’s civic identity. By making the roof walkable and publicly accessible, The Lantern adds a new elevated public ground to the neighborhood and reinforces Ion Riva’s commitment to treating shared space as a fundamental design driver rather than a surplus condition.

The fourth and final cultural building at the heart of Ion Riva has not yet been publicly revealed. It is expected to provide arts, education, and wellness spaces and will function as the central civic anchor for the entire development. Together with The Ring, The Drop, and The Lantern, it will complete a quartet of cultural landmarks that give Ion Riva a distinctly public identity well beyond its residential function.

How Landscape Leads the Ion Riva Master Plan

The most distinctive aspect of the Ion Riva master plan is its explicitly landscape-first planning methodology. Rather than starting with building massing or land use zoning, the design team began with the ecological systems on site: the forest on the hills above, the river cutting through the valley, and the Black Sea coastline at the boundary. Streets, pedestrian paths, building clusters, and green corridors were all positioned to follow and reinforce those existing conditions.

The result is a master plan structured around green infrastructure rather than against it. Shaded pathways and biodiverse green corridors link parks, trails, sports facilities, and open landscapes across the neighborhood. The green corridors also serve a functional ecological purpose, allowing native species movement across the site and connecting the forest above to the coastline below. Approximately 100,000 square meters of biodiverse landscape are planned within the first phase alone.

Walkability is the other structural principle underpinning the master plan. Buildings and pathways maintain clear visual connections toward the sea and the valley at all times, so the landscape remains a continuous presence in daily life rather than something visible only from balconies. The distribution of shared facilities, community spaces, cultural venues, and recreational areas throughout the site means residents are always within a short pedestrian route of a significant shared amenity. Digital systems are integrated across the neighborhood to support comfort, efficiency, and long-term sustainability management.

Ion Riva and Istanbul’s Urban Development Context

Ion Riva occupies a specific and significant position within Istanbul’s broader urban growth story. The city has expanded dramatically northward along both the European and Asian shores over the past two decades, and the Beykoz district on the Asian side has until recently remained relatively undeveloped compared to the city’s core. The Black Sea coast north of the Bosphorus offers steep topography, forested hills, and coastal frontage that make it both ecologically sensitive and commercially attractive.

The Ion Riva master plan represents a particular vision for how that development pressure can be channeled, one that prioritizes ecological integrity, walkability, and cultural life alongside housing supply. Whether the project serves as a model for future development in the area or remains an exception will depend partly on its reception when the first residents arrive in 2027 and partly on Istanbul’s regulatory environment for coastal and forested land.

Istanbul has a long and layered architectural history, from the great domed complexes of Ottoman architecture to contemporary waterfront projects along the Golden Horn and Bosphorus. Ion Riva adds a new chapter by bringing three of the world’s most prominent architecture firms to a site that has been shaped far more by geology and ecology than by prior urban development. For those tracking the international architectural calendar, projects such as the 2025 World Architecture Festival award highlights offer a useful frame for how landscape-integrated master planning is being recognized globally.

The Architects Behind Ion Riva

Each of the three international firms brings a distinct design philosophy that shapes its contribution to Ion Riva.

Snøhetta, founded in Oslo in 1989, has built a global reputation for architecture that dissolves the boundary between building and landscape. The Oslo Opera House, which features a sloping public roof that people walk across, established the firm’s signature approach: every building surface is a potential public ground. That philosophy is fully present in The Ring, which turns a river crossing into a civic destination.

MVRDV, founded in Rotterdam in 1993 by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Nathalie de Vries, is known for work that challenges conventional assumptions about density, program, and material. The firm’s approach to heritage restoration and adaptive reuse reflects the same core interest visible in The Lantern: how do you make a building that belongs to everyone?

Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), founded in Copenhagen in 2005, has become one of the most prolific architecture firms of its generation, with projects spanning housing, cultural buildings, infrastructure, and urban planning across four continents. The Drop at Ion Riva reflects BIG’s consistent interest in architecture that performs multiple roles simultaneously: it is a public amenity, a coastal experience, and a material statement about sustainable construction.

For those interested in exploring master planning and urban design further, ArchDaily’s coverage of Ion Riva provides detailed drawings and project documentation, while Dezeen’s reporting includes additional renderings and direct statements from partners at all three firms. The Snøhetta project page and the MVRDV studio website offer the most complete official documentation of each firm’s contribution.