BY MIKE WILLIAMS
New NewUrban
Neyran Turan’s words tumble out, one overtaking the last in a rush of ideas that barely coalesce before the next comes along. Topics shift from Rice to Istanbul to her journal at Harvard to her students to her practice to theater and music to ... well, you get the idea.
It’s
a good thing Turan has so many outlets — as an assistant professor at the Rice School of Architecture (RSA), as a partner in NEMEstudio, and as a founder and editor of New Geographies, a journal published by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design — because she needs them all. “I know if I just write, it will kill me,” she said. “On the other hand, if I just build, I won’t have time to reflect on what I’m doing or time to challenge myself. I need to be challenged by students or colleagues or the environment I’m in.” Constant striving for new challenges brought Turan to Houston two years ago after graduate studies at Yale and Harvard and undergraduate work in her native Turkey. At Rice, she loves being part of a small, lively community that suits her rapid-fire pace. For students and colleagues, trying to keep up with her is just part of the fun. Turan’s work focuses on contemporary interpretations of scale, infrastructure and ecology and their potential for new ways to interact within architecture and urbanism. “In architecture school,” she said, “we’re very good at doing nice, beautiful things, but sometimes, when you introduce an element, the idea is lost. I’m always intrigued by works that exhibit a certain mode of invention. It can be anything: the purpose of the building, the way it looks, the way it uses space — anything that opens up people’s horizons. That moment of invention happens naturally — it’s not something that’s forced onto the building. Even if you’re not an architect, you should look at the building and say, ‘That’s interesting. I never thought a building could do that.’” In one of her graduate design studios, Turan introduced the idea of the Mundaneum, which is an old word for a world museum of knowledge. The Mundaneum was a project conceived in the 1910s in Belgium, for which Le Corbusier created a design in the 1920s. “While the project was never realized,” Turan said, “it created important debates in architectural history.” Turan asked her students to create a contemporary Mundaneum “that would evoke new ideas in relation to architectural monumentality and public space, while acting as an international center of knowledge in the city.” Students in the studio, taught in
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collaboration with Associate Professor of Architecture Farés el-Dahdah, are designing parallel museums for two of the world’s great cities: Istanbul and Brasilia. Great and rapid urbanization in Istanbul was the topic of one of Turan’s earlier design studios at Rice as well as her doctoral dissertation at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Titled “Islands and Voids,” the Rice course proposed new architectural typologies for living and working along the urban edge of Istanbul. “The edge of the city is growing fast, with big-box stores, high-density housing and uncontrolled development. At its edge, Istanbul is becoming generic,” she said with a note of resignation at the inevitable. “It’s ironic that Google maps of the city can’t cope with the speed of its development. It’s hard to criticize efficiency. It’s about capital, and you can’t ignore it as something that doesn’t exist.” The studio investigated efficiency as an architectural problem and speculated on alternative forms of density at multiple sites along the city’s edge. Turan spent her childhood in Istanbul, the city known in ancient times as Byzantium and Constantinople, and her path to architecture was partly defined by an early interest in her surroundings: She grew up near the city-center campus of Istanbul Technical University, which hosts the architecture school. “The building was an old 19th-century barracks,” Turan said. “I used to pass by the building and think, ‘Am I going to be like those architectural students one day?’ There was something strange about the environment of the school that haunted me.” Architecture continued to hold her attention during her early schooling despite flirtations with music (she studied cello) and theater, the highlight of which came in high school when she starred in the leading role of Nellie in an English-language production of “South Pacific.” When she finally went to Istanbul Technical University, her introduction to architecture during orientation at the university came from, of all people, a chef. “He was a famous chef in Turkey — always on TV shows — and he gave one of the opening talks when I started at the school,” Turan said. “We learned at the talk that he actually had a degree in architecture, and we wondered if cooking was just a sideline.