ACSA honors Neyran Turan with a Creative Achievement Award for her MArch thesis teaching

The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture awarded Associate Professor Neyran Turan the 2025 ACSA Creative Achievement Award. This award honors specific creative achievements in teaching, design, scholarship, research, or service that advance architectural education. It recognizes Turan’s teaching of the Master of Architecture thesis seminar and studio sequence at UC Berkeley from 2017 to 2024, which was themed “Another Imagination—Another Practice.” Turan is currently the director of Berkeley’s MArch program.

How to imagine being an architect today on a burning planet marching toward climate catastrophe? Instead of resorting to greenwashing, how can we imagine, project, and practice architecture with a sustained sense of optimism? Turan challenged MArch students to explore these questions by radically reimagining architecture as a discipline, field, and practice. Through the concept of restaging, her thesis course sequence has positioned architecture as a potential framework for imagining probable climate futures.

Turan says: “As I observe my former students embarking on various trajectories and roles in the field, I hope their thesis projects completed in my courses empower them to continue exploring the specific roles we can play as both citizens and architects in inspiring, reimagining, and rebuilding a world where all people coexist, thrive, and live together with joy.”