Neyran Turan is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of California-Berkeley and a founding partner at NEMESTUDIO.
Turan's scholarship draws on alternative forms of environmental imagination within architecture and urbanism and their capacity to prompt new aesthetic and political lines of inquiry for the design disciplines. Her research and creative work take on this task by presenting a set of unconventional collisions between architecture and climate change, which reflect on broader concerns of the city, environment, and geography through the lens of specific architectural questions such as representation and materiality. On the one hand, these collisions stage and speculate about the critical issues of our present condition, such as resource extraction and waste. On the other, they aspire to prompt new directions for resituating architecture’s engagement with the world through a set of renewed relationships between the architectural and the planetary. Her most recent book Architecture as Measure (Actar Publishers, 2020) elaborates on the cultural and disciplinary potentials of a new architectural planetary imagination.
Turan’s practice NEMESTUDIO has been widely recognized with several awards, most recently the 2016 Architectural League New York Prize for Young Architects, multiple citations at the 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 The Architects' Newspaper Best of Design Awards, a Notable Award at the Core 77 Design Awards, an ACSA Faculty Design Award, and multiple Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts awards. The work of the office has been widely published and exhibited internationally at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Storefront Art and Architecture Gallery, Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Aedes Architecture Forum Gallery in Berlin, Betts Project in London, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, SALT gallery, Druker Design Gallery at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Yale School of Architecture, Banvard Gallery in Columbus, Parsons New School of Design Gallery in New York, Wurster Gallery in Berkeley, Istanbul Design Biennial, and among other venues. Turan has recently been selected to curate the Pavilion of Turkey in the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Turan is the founding chief-editor of the Harvard Graduate School of Design journal New Geographies, which focuses on contemporary issues of urbanism and architecture, and is the editor-in-chief of the first two volumes of the journal: New Geographies 0 (2008) and New Geographies: After Zero (2009). Her current book project, Geographic Istanbul: Episodes in the History of a City’s Relationship with its Landscape, focuses on a specific reading of the Bosphorus Strait of the twentieth-century Istanbul in the context of the relationships it presents among geography, politics and urbanism. Some of her recent writings have been published in journals and edited books including, Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, Are We Human?, Perspecta, ARPA Journal, SAN ROCCO, Architectural Design (AD) Magazine, CARTHA, New Geographies, Scenario Journal, MAS Context, MONU, Bidoun, Thresholds, 20/20: Editorial Takes on Architectural Discourse, The Superlative City, Landscapes of Development, and Mega-Cities.
Prior to joining the University of California, Berkeley, Turan was Assistant Professor at Rice University’s School of Architecture. She holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard University, a Master of Environmental Design from Yale University’s School of Architecture, and a Bachelor of Architecture from Istanbul Technical University.
Neyran Turan, Architecture as Measure (Barcelona and New York: Actar Publishers, 2020).
