The Pavilion of Turkey 

Type: Installation and Publication
Position: Assistant Curator
Year: 2021

Honoree, BEST OF YEAR AWARDS 2021, Interior Design Magazine



Selected Press/Reviews: Metropolis, Elle Decor, Domus, Architects' Journal, Metalocus, Tracés, The Architects' Newspaper, Detail Magazine, Inexhibit, e-flux, ArchDaily, World Architecture, Açık Radyo, NTV Radyo, ArtAsiaPacific, Gazete Oksijen, Art Dealer Street, Miliyet Mimarlik, Daily Sabah, TRTWorld.

In light of the current climate crisis, what can architecture contribute towards a new planetary imagination of our contemporary environment beyond environmentalism and technological determinism? Architecture as Measure positions climate change as a cultural and political idea that requires a renewed architectural environmental imagination.

The Architecture as Measure project defines the planetary as the vast geo-temporal scales through which climate emergency accelerates. Presented through an installation, a website publication, and storytelling, the Architecture as Measure project for the Pavilion of Turkey at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia titled How Will We Live Together? focuses on the politics and nuances of the seemingly mundane aspects and sites of architectural construction, juxtaposing them with their respective planetary counterparts through geographies of material extraction, supply chains, maintenance and care in Turkey and beyond.

In our current day and age of spectacle and excess, PLAT 6.0 Absence aims to offer a moment of pause and shift our focus to the quiet, unseen, unnoticed, and rare. This issue of PLAT constructs a nuanced reading of our discipline, arguing that the constant historizations and theorizations of the ‘built’ may have left ‘absence’ undertheorized. Whether tired, bored of, or in an attempt to escape what is constantly there, the editors and contributors of this issue are seduced by absence. Absence is used as a tool to see the world extraordinarily and re-evaluate the “present.”

Perhaps it is a simple play of our prefixes: what is unseen is reseen; the deconstructed reconstructed; the indeterminate redetermined; and so on. The collection of work in this issue conveys the range of readings that arise from a word, arguing that, both semantically and derivatively, absence's meaning is manifold. Whether it is through focusing on absence as a physical, social, psychological, economic, destructive, or uncertain entity, the contributors of this issue unwittingly weave together to showcase the superfluity of interpretation.