Although a monumental structure that lost its original form years ago within the urban texture of Galata has been known as the Ottoman Bank for more than a century and perceived as a single structure, it was actually designed as the administrative center of two separate organizations. Ottoman Empire Tobacco Regime Company and Ottoman Bank.

At the end of the 1880s, a part of a large plot of land on Vojvoda Street purchased by the Tobacco Regime was transferred to the Bank, and Alexandre Vallaury, the famous Levantine architect of the time, was commissioned with the design of a contemporary, magnificent structure for both organizations.

The design dilemma in the building shows radical differences as if the facades in the direction of Vojvoda Street and Golden Horn show that two separate architects designed two different buildings at different times. The facade of Vojvoda Street is designed with size, layout, proportion and structure structures that comply with the design rules of classical, neo-classical architecture. Vallaury’s design reflects the now clarifying uniformity of 19th-century banks.

The wide fringe, supported by long iron bars on the side façades (which do not exist today), is also the dominant element of the Golden Horn façade. On this facade, the eaves corners rotate, cut in the middle, and equipped with other elements that give extraordinary mobility to the floors above it.

In those years, Vallaury sprinkled the details reminiscent of traditional houses on the upper floors with the concern of alleviating the overwhelm of a giant mass in the urban mosaic of Galata, where large and small wooden buildings were still in the majority. There are three mansions in the structure; one in the middle and two in the corners.

With this structure, Vallaury proved that the attention to be paid to the single building scale and aesthetics in the maintenance of urban identity is an important design problem.