Turkey’s mega projects keep being recognized with international prizes. Recently, Istanbul metro received the grand prize in the 2019 AEC Excellence Awards, which is among the world’s most prestigious events. This year’s competition was a first for Turkey, with Yüksel Proje, which applied with two projects, namely the Istanbul Rail System Design Services for the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, and the Ümraniye-Ataşehir-Göztepe Metro Line, taking the grand prize for both projects, having been designed through the Building Information Modeling (BIM) approach. The award in the category of “Infrastructure Design – Medium Project” was received by Aslı Şahin Akyol, the Rail Systems Projects Manager of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, while the award in the category of “Infrastructure Design – Large Project” was received by the Gülermak-Nurol-Makyol JV and Yüksel Proje team. In the preparation phase of the considerably challenging project, an integrated BIM platform uniting different disciplines under a single umbrella was established. The project model aims to reduce both time and costs, and stands out as an example of effective coordination, starting from the design phase, that is planned to be mirrored in the following phases. 16 percent cost savings with BIM. The construction works of the 13-km Ümraniye-Ataşehir-Göztepe Metro Line project, which includes also 11 stations, are being carried out by the Gülermak Nurol Makyol Joint Venture. Extensive engineering experience is required for the design and construction works, as the stations are located in densely-populated regions of the city. The BIM technologies used in the project that won the award in the >$500 million category resulted in 16 percent cost savings.