Tülay Atak appointed professor

The Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna is pleased to announce that Tülay Atak has been appointed as its ​Theory of Architecture professor.

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 pursued her PhD at UCLA, with the dissertation “Byzantine Modern: Displacements of Modernism in Istanbul.” In addition to her own research, she has participated in collaborative research projects in India and Switzerland and worked with non-profit organizations like Cape Cod Modern House Trust and Grace Farms. 

Tülay’s co-edited book, Pedagogical Experiments in Architecture for a Changing Climate, has been published by Routledge. Her research has been supported by the Graham Foundation and her writing and scholarship have appeared in journals such as Architectural Theory Review, OASE, Future Anterior, Architektur Aktuell, Architect’s Newspaper, and books including Byzantium / Modernism, and Fragile City. She curated the exhibition, Energy at the Threshold of the Visible World at AIL in Vienna. 

Tülay has taught at SCI-Arc, CalPoly Pomona, Cornell, RISD, Cooper Union, RPI and Pratt Institute. In her teaching, her goal is to bridge the gap between history, theory and design. Her seminars, studios and lecture classes emphasize the value of design education in finding forms to express the needs and desires of societies, in developing processes that can provide alternatives to existing practices, and in imagining potential futures.

In discussing her ambition for theory at the Institute, Atak comments: 

“As architects and academics, we have to think about the “worldliness” of our profession and discipline, or how architectural ideas transform and adapt to different contexts and events. Architectural theory can articulate the links between architecture’s disciplinary knowledge and contemporary questions. Theory can play a foundational role in the design curriculum by tracing the transformation of architectural ideas, by articulating the links between specific examples and their social and cultural contexts, by deepening the theoretical underpinnings of formal operations and by mapping how the field of architecture can expand in order to address contemporary questions and diverse audiences.”

“Perhaps most importantly, architectural theory is concerned with the relationship between what ‘is present’ and what ‘can be imagined’, allowing us to look forward and backward, and consider what remains constant and what changes in the discipline as it addresses current challenges.”

Sam Jacob, Dean of the Institute, adds “We would like to welcome Tülay more officially now to the I oA after a number of years of working together. We look forward to finding ways to oscillate, blur, antagonise and otherwise collaborate between design and theory to forge new directions and possibilities for our own community and beyond”.