About

I am an architect, researcher, educator, and designer based in Chicago. My work has taken shape across Turkey, Italy, and the United States, moving between architectural practice, history, heritage, teaching, writing, and spatial research.

Across these different forms of work, I keep returning to the same question: what makes a place what it is? I am interested in architecture not only as built form, but as something continually shaped through use, memory, care, movement, loss, adaptation, and the relationships that gather around it. I am often drawn to what is overlooked, less visible, or easily left outside conventional ways of reading a place, and to what these smaller details can reveal about larger spatial, social, and historical relations.

I hold a PhD in Architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology, where I developed the Four-Quadrant Framework, a relational mapping method for examining heritage practices across two intersecting dimensions: material–immaterial and official–unofficial. Post-earthquake Antakya became the primary empirical field through which I tested and refined the framework, but the questions behind it extend beyond heritage toward a broader interest in how places are known, inhabited, transformed, remembered, and carried forward.

Alongside my academic and design work, I am the founder of iz(trace), an independent relational research and spatial practice. iz(trace) begins with the trace—spatial, material, social, or remembered—and uses observation, documentation, mapping, and experimental forms of making to follow the relationships those traces reveal.