Madonna in a Fur Coat is one of the greatest novels in Turkish literature which inspired the Istanbul-based architecture firm Tabanlioglu Architects to create a unique project at the Victoria & Albert Museum, as part of the London Design Festival.

The evocative installation, titled Beloved, takes the form of a 13-metre-long mirrored black box on the bridge. Visitors are able to peer inside through cracks in the surface of the enclosure to see atmospheric scenes from the novel re-created using cinematic techniques, physical objects, text, light, and sound. “The installation is a physical, multi-sensory realization of the way the human mind imagines scenes from a book as they read,” says Tabanlıoğlu. “It’s a very intimate experience that celebrates literature, passion and the human condition.”


Tabanlıoğlu Architects chose to site the installation on the bridge as a metaphor to describe the themes of the novel, which deals with the relationship between a young Turkish man and an enigmatic German woman, and is set between interwar period in two cities; Berlin and Ankara.