Research Expertise and Interest
architectural design and climate change, planetary imagination and architectural design, climate futures, architecture and the Anthropocene, architectural construction and climate change, low-carbon architectural construction, hempcrete construction, bio-materials and design
Research Description
Neyran Turan is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of California-Berkeley and a founding partner at NEMESTUDIO.
Turan's design work and research focus on the role of architecture in the climate crisis. Her most recent book, Architecture as Measure (Actar Publishers, 2020), elaborates on initial cultural and disciplinary provocations of her current work on climate change and argues for a fundamental change in how we imagine the planet as architects. Her current work expands into new lines of inquiry that focus more on the interaction between alternative forms of planetary imagination and architectural practice, which collides cultural, technical, and aesthetic specificities of architecture with unconventional and non-extractive planetary imaginations it can be part of, and the more systemic changes that are necessary to enable this interaction.
Turan’s practice NEMESTUDIO has been widely recognized with several awards, most recently the 2024 Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard, 2016 Architectural League New York Prize for Young Architects, multiple citations in 2022, 2021, 2019, 2018, 2017, and 2016 The Architects’ Newspaper Best of Design Awards, Best of Year Honoree Award from Interior Design Magazine, multiple citations at the Core 77 Design Awards in 2017 and 2022, multiple ACSA Faculty Design Awards in 2019 and 2023 for outstanding work in architecture and related environmental design fields as a critical endeavor, 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 Venice Architecture Biennale, Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Storefront Art and Architecture Gallery, La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Betts Project gallery in London, Aedes Architecture Forum Gallery in Berlin, Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles, The Cooper Union in New York, Druker Design Gallery of Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Parsons New School of Design Gallery in New York, Pratt Manhattan Gallery in New York, The Cooper Union in New York, Yale School of Architecture Gallery, Chicago Architecture Center, SALT in Istanbul, Michigan University Taubman Collage, Virginia University, the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial “Are We Human,” and many other venues. Turan recently curated the Pavilion of Turkey at 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. Turan’s authored book titled Architecture as Measure, which has been awarded by the Graham Foundation, was released by ACTAR Publishers in 2020.
Prior to joining the University of California, Berkeley, Turan was an 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.