Neyran Turan’s NEMESTUDIO honored with AR Design Vanguard Award

Architectural Record honored Associate Professor Neyran Turan’s architectural office, NEMESTUDIO, with a Design Vanguard 2024 award. Turan, who joined the Department of Architecture faculty in 2016, is currently serving as chair of its MArch program.

Turan founded NEMESTUDIO with Mete Sönmez in 2015. The Bay Area firm, writes AR’s Sarah Amelia, “probes the familiar, intentionally rendering it, as they put it, ‘slightly unfamiliar’ through theoretical discourse and . . . actual buildings.”

Both NEMESTUDIO’s speculative research, such as dioramas exhibited at Cooper Union and the Venice Architecture Biennale, and architectural projects like Hempo Longhouse creatively address the climate crisis while exposing the powerful forces entangled with it.

With Hempo Longhouse, now awaiting construction in Southern California, the studio posits a decarbonized, nonextractive alternative to typical construction practices. Drawing on research funded by a CED Lau Grant for Just Climate Futures, it explores the aesthetic and technological potential of hempcrete, a renewable, carbon-sequestering bio-composite material that was added to the U.S. Residential Building Code in 2022.