Talk: Neyran Turan

SALT Beyoğlu, Walk-in Cinema

On the opening evening of Neyran Turan’s installation STRAIT at SALT Beyoğlu, she will give a talk about potential relationships between geography and architecture.

In his seminal study on the history of geographical ideas, geographer Clarence Glacken writes that there have been three main geographic ideas since the Ancient Greece: the idea of a designed earth, the idea of environmental influence, and the idea of humans as geographic agents. More recently, this formulation is provided with an alternative narrative by debates on climate change and the idea of the Anthropocene, in which humans are now discussed as not only geographic but also as atmospheric and geological agents. In parallel, in architecture and related design fields, contemporary conceptualizations of the idea of environment are constantly presented through the positivist overtones of management, efficiency and performance.

In this context, rather than seeing environment as a systemic and managerial phenomenon, can we instead talk about an alternative kind of geographic imagination in architecture that can offer a renewed and a more nuanced dialogue between environment and aesthetics? Presenting the framework of the STRAIT, the talk will focus on this very question as well as Turan’s various other research, publication, and design projects that all aim to tackle the same question in different ways.

The talk will be held in Turkish.


Neyran Turan is an architect, and currently an Assistant Professor at Rice University School of Architecture. She is also a co-founder of NEMESTUDIO, a research and design collaborative based in Houston. Turan’s work draws on the relationship between geography and design to highlight a range of aesthetic and political possibilities for architecture and urbanism. She holds a doctoral degree from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a masters degree from Yale University School of Architecture, and a Bachelor of Architecture from Istanbul Technical University. She is the founding chief-editor of the journal New Geographies, and is the editor-in-chief of the first two volumes: New Geographies 0 (2008), New Geographies: After Zero (2009). Some of her recent work were published in Thresholds, SAN ROCCO, Conditions, MASContext, ThinkSpace Pamphlets, and MONU. In 2013, Turan won a Graham Foundation Award for her research on the German architect Mathias Ungers. She is currently completing the manuscript of her book titled Geographic Istanbul: Episodes in the History of a City’s Relationship with its Landscape.