Muharrem Hilmi Şenalp was born in 1957 in Konya, where he also attended primary, secondary and high school. After having graduated from Istanbul Technical University (ITU) in 1981, he completed a masters’ program on Building System at the same school, and another masters’ program on Architectural History and Restoration at Yildiz Technical University. He was a member of faculty with Bogazici University for 4 years. Since 1983, he has been operating as a freelance architect-engineer. He designed buildings of various functions where he stylized as simplified architecture or stylistically re-composed the classical Ottoman-Turkish architecture from the pre-westernization and pre-modernism period. He researched into and applied the relation, style and production of virtually all traditional Islamic arts; and having an interest in music, he both performed classical Turkish musical instruments like tanbur, rebab and ney, and he also practiced classical musical style and attitude with renowned composers and master musicians like Cahid Gozkan, Sabahaddin Volkan and Kemal Batanay. The Tokyo Mosque and Turkish Cultural Center project, which he completed in 2000, was elected in 2002 by the Japanese Institute of Architecture and Building Science as one of the 40 elite architectural works which have contributed to Japanese Architecture; and also received the “Elite Lighting Award” from the company National. At World Expo 2005 Aichi Japan, in which 121 countries participated, his Turkey Pavilion project received the “Nature’s Wisdom Golden Award" for design and compliance with theme.
Next to projects and buildings in which he uses fractal geometry and natural forms, which are the essence of Islamic arts, he aspires to create a different style by trying new structures where he, for the first time, extrudes geometric designs into 3D, and always takes care to use an extraordinary architectural language instead of replicating existing works.