Istanbul is a city that forces one to take a position. No one can remain neutral, or try to get by with reassuring platitudes. Its urban layout, its landscape and its architecture are the result of continuous stratification, in which history, geography and contemporary development overlap one another without ever finding a definitive balance. As Orhan Pamuk has written, the destiny of a city often coincides with that of its inhabitants: a condition that becomes one of direct responsibility for those concerned with its architecture. This issue of Area came about in response to the need to look at Istanbul not as an exception, but as an emblematic case. The articles by Luca Molinari and Luca Orlandi reconstruct the profound roots of a complex and discontinuous modernity, showing how the transformations ongoing today are the result of lengthy processes, often interrupted and replaced before resolution could be achieved, that have succeeded one another in the city for more than a century. The rapid growth of the last few decades has amplified the accumulated tension, producing an extended, fragmented metropolis plagued by significant territorial and environmental inequality. Those articles are flanked by interviews with the architects Emre Arolat and Han Tümertekin, who tell us about Istanbul from the inside, through their direct experience of living and working in the city, day to day. Their reflections highlight the central issues: the absence of stable city planning, the weight of major infrastructures, the demand for more housing, the fragility of the natural landscape and the growing distance between the city and its foundational elements: water, topography, public spaces. Under these circumstances, architecture cannot limit itself to producing recognizable images or languages. In Istanbul, the architectural project has to take shape amid a situation of extreme complexity, taking on a role of intercession between memory and change, between urban scale and daily life. Reuse of existing structures, work on the infrastructures, the redevelopment of fringe districts become critical tools even more than operational ones. For years, Area has devoted a monographic issue to a city, understood as a privileged observatory from which to interrogate the urban and architectural project in the present time. Istanbul, today, reveals the many contradictions that trouble our contemporary metropolises. It does not offer models to imitate, but poses a number of urgent questions. It is on these questions that we, as a specialized publication, concentrate our attention and focus our work.