Balance Güneşli is a mixed use development comprising offices, residences and commercial functions, situated along the Basın Ekspres Road, which is fast-becoming a new business district of Istanbul. The design takes the opposite position to the norm established in similar projects across the city; where developments create a closed, exclusive community that has no relationship to the city or the communities surrounding it. It was our position that permeability at the street level, and allowing unfettered access to pedestrians would create a 24/7 living street life. Our starting point was to break up the mass of buildings, envisaging a street pattern that would in future be extended to neighbouring sites. An early decision to retain a sense of human scale across the site, while giving an iconic sense to the project, identifies the location of the tower at the main street, while the lower buildings create the streetscape, rising to no more than 4 stories. Building facades respond to orientation, with solar screens to the southern blocks. There is a partly glazed buffer zone along the pedestrian street, creating a tempered environment during winter. The buffer zone creates an environmentally stable zone along this edge, minimising both heating and cooling energy demand.