News
Tülay Atak appointed I oA guest professor for ‘Theory of Architecture’ at the Angewandte
We are pleased to announce that Tülay Atak has been appointed as guest professor for ‘Theory of Architecture‘ at I oA for the academic year of 2023/24, succeeding I oA’s theory professor 2020 – 2023 Mario Carpo.
Tülay Atak is an architect, historian and theorist whose current work focuses on the intersections between environmental history and architecture. She received her professional architecture degree at METU in Ankara and then pursued her PhD at UCLA. In addition to her own work, she has participated in collaborative research projects, conducting fieldwork in Chandigarh as part of the Getty Research Institute’s ‘Museology and the Colony’ project and archiving the work of the structural engineer Heinz Isler with a team of scholars for the ETH.
Tülay’s co-edited book, Pedagogical Experiments in Architecture for a Changing Climate, is forthcoming from Routledge. Her writing and scholarship has appeared in journals and books such as OASE, Future Anterior, Architektur Aktuell, Byzantium / Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity and Fragile City. She has taught at SCI-Arc, Cornell, RISD, Cooper Union, RPI and Pratt Institute. The Angewandte’s interdisciplinary art and design culture leads to a diverse range of work, making it a unique place to teach and develop research. I oA, with its focus on spatial, technological and conceptual experimentation in architecture, has been at the forefront of architectural education.
Articulating the role of architecture and design is currently an urgent matter as we face urban, environmental and social problems of inequity and climate change. Architectural theory can articulate the links between architecture’s disciplinary knowledge and contemporary questions. Theory can play a foundational role in design curriculum by tracing the transformation of architectural ideas, articulating the links between specific examples and their social and cultural contexts, deepening the theoretical underpinnings of formal operations, and mapping how the field of architecture can expand in order to address contemporary questions and diverse audiences.
At the Angewandte, theory can become a platform where students from different studios come together, a place where students can see the relations between various distinct design questions and experiment with instrumentalizing architectural theories in order to build arguments. Theory can further strengthen students’ design work conceptually, situate their projects in relation to architectural discourse, and help them develop clear narratives for their projects.
