Esra Akcan is a Turkish-American architect, academic and author. Currently, she is the Michael A. McCarthy Professor in the Department of Architecture and the resident director of Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University.[1]
Akcan’s research on modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism focuses on the intertwined histories of Europe and West Asia, and on understanding architecture’s role in global, social and environmental justice. Akcan has also authored over 150 research articles on critical and postcolonial theory, racism, immigration, architectural photography, translation, neoliberalism, and global history.[2]
Akcan’s research on modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism explains the intertwined histories of the world, with special emphasis on Europe and West Asia. She specializes in architectural history and theory, along with migration and diaspora studies. Her research explores the geopolitically conscious design practice, critical and postcolonial theory, immigration, translation, racism, architectural photography and neoliberalism.[2]
Akcan’s books offer new ways of understanding the global movement of architecture, local and distant producers, and also the receivers of architecture. Her book ‘’Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House’’ extends the notion of translation beyond language to visual fields. It advocates a commitment to a new culture of translatability from below and in multiple directions for cosmopolitan ethics and global justice. This book is reviewed as an “indispensable reading”[4] and a work that “sets the stage for future work”[5] Kyle Evered, from Michigan State University, reviewed the book as “clearly a ‘next step' in scholarly works … also an ideal ‘first step’ toward analyzing more critically the dynamics of interaction and exchange that we today otherwise generalize under terms like modernization, globalization, or development…. The most readable and thoughtful history of ideas”.[6]
‘’Turkey: Modern Architectures in History’’, published in 2012 and co-authored with Sibel Bozdoğan, was reviewed by Bülent Batuman, as “well beyond a descriptive overview of modern Turkish architecture”. He stated that the book provided a “masterfully told history of Turkish architecture from the 1920s to the 2010s” and that it is “a very well written text, easy to read for even non-architects”[7]
Akcan published ‘’Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA-1984/87’’ in 2018. This book defines open architecture as the translation of a new ethics of hospitality into design process and focuses on formal, programmatic and procedural steps towards open architecture during the urban renewal of Berlin’s immigrant neighborhood. In a positive review of the book, Clemens Filkenstein wrote that “Open Architecture, with its innovative methodology and style, becomes a manifesto to propagate not only spaces of hospitality but the writing of ‘open architectural history.’”[8]
Awards and honors
2009 - Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) Visiting Scholar[9]
2010 - Arnheim-Professor at Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt University, Berlin.[10]
Abolish Human Bans: Intertwined Histories of Architecture (2022)
Selected articles
Homo oeconomicus of the ‘New Turkey’: Urban Development of Istanbul in the 2000s, Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the present, Kenny Cupers, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Helena Mattsson (eds) (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)
How does architecture heal? AKM as Palimpsest and Ghost South Atlantic Quarterly 118/1, special issue edited by Bülent Küçük and Ceren Özselçuk, January 2019, pp. 81–89.
Translation Theory and the Intertwined Histories of Building for Self-Governance, in 'Terms of Appropriation, Ana Miljacki, Amanda Lawrance (eds.) (London: Routledge, 2018)
Is a Global History of Architecture Displayable? A Historiographical Perspective on the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale and Louvre Abu Dhabi, Art Margins, vol.4, no.1 (January 2015): 79-101.
Off the Frame: The Panoramic City Albums of Istanbul in Photography’s Orientalism (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013): 93-115
