Bosphorus Strait: Architectural Imagination of a Resource Geography

Tuesday, 11/22/16
494 Wurster Hall

Architect Neyran Turan will speak about her investigations of Istanbul, including her solo installation titled STRAIT, which considered scales ranging from the body to the region. Her current book project, Geographic Istanbul: Episodes in the History of a City’s Relationship with its Landscape, focuses on today's Bosphorus Strait in the context of geography, politics and urbanism.

Neyran Turan is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of California-Berkeley and a partner at NEMESTUDIO, founded by Neyran Turan and Mete Sonmez, an architectural office that produces work ranging from buildings and installations to speculative projects in various scales. NEMESTUDIO has recently received the 2016 Architectural League of New York Prize for Young Architects. The work of the office has been featured at various design magazines and platforms including Wallpaper*, ICON magazine, RevistaPLOT, Artwort, ItsNiceThat, Socks, Designboom, and has been exhibited at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial (curated by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley), the Chicago Architecture Biennial, SALT, and the Aronson Gallery at the Parsons School of Design in New York. 

Turan's work draws on the relationship between geography and design to highlight their interaction for new aesthetic and political trajectories within architecture and urbanism. Her current research focuses on questions of representation and resource in relation to climate change and on new conceptions of the ordinary and the familiar in architecture.

Part of the Cities and Bodies colloquium of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, an interdisciplinary project that investigates cities using methods from the arts and humanities as well as from the environmental design disciplines.

IMPORTANT: 494 Wurster is in the SOUTH Tower of Wurster Hall. If you are on the fourth floor in the North Tower you cannot walk across to the South Tower unless you go down to the third floor.  When you enter Wurster Hall's main (west) entrance, turn right and take the single elevators in the South Tower up to the fourth floor. If you take one of the double elevators you are in the North Tower.