Photography by İbrahim Özbunar.
OPEN WIDE
PROJECTS
Ankara's Smiles clinic starts from an unlikely provocation: what if a dental clinic felt less like a medical facility and more like a private art club. Wangan Studio takes that question seriously across 1,100 square metres, treating patients as guests moving through a space built on calm and curiosity rather than clinical routine.
The plan itself resists the corridor and cubicle logic most healthcare design defaults to. Stone clad volumes act as freestanding units rather than fixed walls, at times closing off a treatment room for privacy, at other times opening into exhibition surfaces for the clinic's rotating art collection. That fluidity lets the space shift constantly between exposure and discretion, an arrangement suited to a place where people want to be seen in the lounge and left alone in consultation.
Materially, the clinic reads as monolithic rather than clinical. Grey stone rises from the floor in unbroken, sculptural blocks, positioned at varying scale and proportion to carve out consultation rooms and doctors' offices from what would otherwise be an abstract open volume. Black oak cladding is reserved for walls alone, giving the stone room to read as structure rather than finish.
At the welcome desk, a slab of richly veined red stone is set against glass, tilted and displaced as though caught mid movement out of the ground, a deliberate friction between something permanent and something fragile.
Art threads through the building as structure rather than decoration. A standing collection and rotating exhibitions, featuring artists including Seçkin Pirim and Tom Fellows, are worked directly into the stone volumes, so a wall that divides two treatment rooms doubles as a place to encounter a new piece on a return visit.
Furniture throughout leans into the same gallery adjacent register, Cameleonda modular seating in olive leather, a Wassily chair, tactile Baxter sofas in the lounge, chosen with as much care as the stonework around them.
What Smiles ultimately argues is that a healthcare interior doesn't need to announce its function through sterility. By building the clinic on permanence, stone, marble, weight, while letting its curatorial programme keep shifting, Wangan Studio has made a space that treats care and culture as inseparable rather than as two briefs competing for the same room.
