Cenotaph for Virilio, 2019, Alican Taylan, Cat Wilmes, Can Imamoglu, Digital photograph on metal-coated paper © Image courtesy Alican Taylan.

With exhibitions ranging from an exploration of the structural qualities of Black hairstyling techniques to an examination of local carnival architecture in Trinidad, this year's crop of Graham Foundation Production and Presentation grants has joined a field of notable proposals in their inquiry into the future of architecture and the built environment. Among the twelve grantees in the category, Alican Taylan stands out for his criticism of capitalistic development schemes, industry norms that are out of touch with human needs, and exploitative practices that take advantage of impending ecological emergencies.

Taylan, an architectural designer, critic, and engineer, had been reading Lefebvre and working on marine projects after undergrad when the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Istanbul triggered a shift in his thinking. The protests furthered the idea for him that space is indeed political and sparked an interest in research topics at the center of his forthcoming exhibition. In early 2023, Taylan will join Elisa Iturbe and Stanley Cho in presenting their “Confronting Carbon Form” in a twelve-week show at Cooper Union's Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery.

Here, the grantee and current Pratt lecturer charts his journey from the studio of Peter Eisenman to his own independent work as a curator, writer, and presenter with a focus on his influences and hopes for the future. The interview has been edited for length. 

Talk to me about the grant proposal. When did you all find out? How did you and your partners put together the exhibition, and how did that turn into a grant proposal? Where were you when you got the news?

The Graham Foundation grants have a special place in architecture because they have historically funded some of the most impactful research in the discipline such as Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction [in Architecture] or Koolhaas’s Delirious New York. This year, if I remember the numbers correctly, there were over a total of seven hundred applications, and around thirty were granted an exhibition grant. This makes it a great honor and a big responsibility. 

The grant project we submitted is titled “Confronting Carbon Form” and is a direct continuation of Elisa Iturbe’s research, started in Log 47 (that she guest-edited), which was titled “Overcoming Carbon Form.” Elisa and Stanley Cho, who founded Outside Development together and who are my partners in this collaboration, have been working on projects tackling conditions created by the carbon-intensive energy paradigm that the world is based on today. They propose to rethink modes of land ownership and current architectural assumptions about what “sustainability” is. Their research is a stunning start, and Elisa is already making people realize that there must be another basis for considering the relationship of architecture to the environment.

Carbon form proposes a paradigm-shifting reading of architecture, where the environmental impact of the discipline is not limited to façade systems or LEED points a building gets but to its architectural form

The way I understand it, carbon form proposes a paradigm-shifting reading of architecture, where the environmental impact of the discipline is not limited to façade systems or LEED points a building gets but to its architectural form: its underlying, invisible assumptions about what buildings are and how their spaces are organized. 

My work is more versatile. On one side, I do some somewhat more conventional architectural built projects, where theoretical considerations are of course present but perhaps not dominant. How can you address carbon form in a barn extension project? Or an interior renovation in the city? These projects require very direct, pragmatic responses to their site parameters. On the other side, the other half of my time is dedicated to writing, art projects, and exhibitions. 

I worked on putting together an exhibition at the Pratt Institute in 2019, Aesthetics of Prosthetics, assessing the current state of affairs in digital design tools and their relationship to architectural representation. But instead of a technocratic stance, praising these tools, we took a techno-critical position. In other words, we wanted to scrutinize the digital tools everyone takes for granted and see them under a new light, as prosthetics, as extensions of the body. 

Another exhibition project I was involved in was artist Blane de St. Croix’s comprehensive solo exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts, How to Move a Landscape. It is still on view until September and is a beautiful show that gathers new and old work of his. We worked on the exhibition design together, and I did design work on one of the largest pieces in there, Cold Front. 

I am also currently working on a piece for a book on anthropology/architecture/cinema, a trio I find fascinating, and a public art proposal in Los Angeles focused on a study of tree root systems. 

So, to answer your question about how we put the grant proposal together: On my side, it came from a desire to work with Elisa on her research in an exhibition format, using an array of methodologies—artistic, journalistic, scholarly, cinematic, anthropological—in order to end up with an exhibition on architecture. 

Of course, the most important factor remains the urgency of the subject. I do not understand why everyone is not putting their energy, their teaching, their work, into addressing climate breakdown. How can we keep discussing whether we are in a post-digital world or not when the world is on fire?

Your inclination toward climate-related projects started early on in the different studios that you worked for. Which projects did you work on specifically that influenced the things you're working on today?

I would say it is precisely the lack of climate-related thinking in contemporary practices that pushes me to imagine ways of integrating it in the discipline in original ways. This said, all projects I have worked on in offices have had a “sustainability” aspect. But these aspects were limited to building assembly techniques, material usage, and at their best, processes of material sourcing.

I do not understand why everyone is not putting their energy, their teaching, their work, into addressing climate breakdown. How can we keep discussing whether we are in a post-digital world or not when the world is on fire?

Shigeru Ban’s University of Arkansas design center proposal, a beautiful design in many ways, was all about celebrating wood joinery and building out of wood. With CLTs becoming increasingly popular for their carbon sequestering qualities in taller buildings, the project aimed at being a demonstration of the many ways of assembling wood elements for architecture students to learn from. And this is all nice and good but is exactly where, Elisa argues, the problem is. By cornering the question of “sustainability” as a matter of building assembly only, the problem is displaced in a technical field. The underlying thought in this displacement is that only technology can be the answer to climate breakdown, by making more “efficient” buildings. This whole logic of genericness, of repeatable models holding true in all conditions—that we inherited from Modernism—needs to be questioned. In contrast to the 20th century, the 21st century is a century where we are now aware that we do not live in a world with endless resources and repeatable models ad infinitum.

Climate change is at the forefront of the Memory of a Forest installation that you designed, but it quickly took on an added importance as a "meditative" space for the healthcare workers in the building during COVID. Has the pandemic affected your thinking about architecture? How might it change the "dominant mode of thought" that the exhibition assumes?

Memory of a Forest is a public art proposal I did with artist Blane de St. Croix that won first prize at an invited competition. The proposal consists of three large cabinets installed in a new Emergency Medical Service building under construction in the Bronx. Blane’s lifelong work reflects on nature—he works at all scales from monumental outdoor sculptures to miniatures. For this project, our idea was to mix the two extremes. Can space be expanded in such a way that it is perceivable as gigantic, and yet is physically small? We took as our precedent a 1969 model of Archizoom’s No-Stop City project. The model cleverly boxes four sides of a model with mirrors to create an infinite field of generic urbanity. Archizoom’s model is precisely calibrated to create a controlled design, that can be repeated, or mirrored, infinitely. The logic of this model mirrors that of Modernism’s infinite replicability. 

Our cabinet has a miniature forest inside it: a model of the forest that used to be in the Bronx before urbanization cut it down. It is intentionally made to not look geometrically mirrored, because a forest, unlike modernist urbanism, cannot be serially replicated. Instead, it is the uncontrolled quality of nature that is exacerbated and repeated by sequestering light rays between two mirrors. The front glass of the cabinet is a double-sided mirror, allowing one to see through but acting as a mirror from the inside (the same glass that is used in interrogation rooms). The back mirror is a conventional mirror.

With the COVID outbreak, the project was put on hold, like all construction in the USA. We were expecting this project to fall through because public art pieces are typically the first ones to be dropped when the ship starts taking water. Against all expectations, the Fire Department made sure these three cabinets remained in the project.   

Paul Virilio has come back into vogue as a product of the pandemic. What about his work appeals to you? In your own mind, how do his theories apply to the ongoing ecological breakdown we've been living through?

I did not know he was in vogue! I always loved his writings and theories for their high originality, and his recent death made me want to do projects referencing some of his ideas. In an age where even the most influential architects and writers are forgotten by students and young designers because everyone is too busy scrolling their smartphones, I thought that even if a handful of people looked into Virilio and his work after seeing one of my two projects, that would be a win. 

The first Virilio project was a collaboration with Cat Wilmes and Can Imamoglu for an exhibition that opened after Virilio’s passing. The project was a cenotaph for him, located in Normandy, obviously. All the floors were obliquely tilted to become ramps while what looked like ramps were actually flat surfaces. An oblique inversion of some sort. His architecture of the oblique that he developed with Claude Parent would live on in this space, and a mirror setup similar to the one in the Memory of a Forest project would multiply ad infinitum an animated loop from the floor to the ceiling of the hundred feet tall atrium. 

The second Virilio project was a drawing for Log 47 that I made as a response to Elisa’s prompt. I knew it would appear on the last page of this two-hundred-page issue about a new way to think about architecture and the environment. It sounded pretty serious, so first I drew something very ambitious: a master plan for a decentralized urban network connected through mass transit and infilled with agricultural fields in a rural part of North Carolina. Corb was under fire in the issue, so I took a cue from the urban planner that he revered in his youth but rejected afterward, Camillo Sitte. After weeks of working on the drawing, it was rejected by Elisa because it looked like a proposed solution to carbon form, which would perhaps be too self-righteous of a way to end the issue. I agreed but then had no drawing to send to her. Virilio came to my help when I discovered that there are people across the planet, mostly in the US, who are buying retrofitted bunkers in an attempt to be safe during our oncoming apocalyptic conditions. These people, called preppers or survivalists, are investing millions of dollars into doomsday military bunkers with spas and pool tables. The drawing would be an ad for one of these bunkers in Normandy that Virilio had conveniently documented with beautiful plans and sections in his Bunker Archaeology. I would design the interior of that bunker for the lucky survivalist. Of course, the drawing is a humorous critique of preppers, but Virilio’s account of military bunkers goes a long way.

The regime of building is deeply flawed, especially in large metropolises. Projects are built as tools of financial investment, not for anyone’s needs. That’s what needs to change, and of course, that’s not easy to change.

Every odd-looking angle in those designs has the technology of their time embedded in them because the angles are precisely calibrated for the firearms of their period to reach their maximum range. The design is hence imbued with time and speed. That’s a subject that Greg Lynn also touches upon when talking about boats and aircrafts and how the shape of a boat’s hull is the shape of the water flow. This frozen dynamism is fascinating, but I am digressing. 

Virilio’s invented science, “dromology,” is visionary, and I later found out that Mimi Scheller’s text in that Log issue also referenced Virilio and dromology. In that sense, Virilio is absolutely relevant for environmental thinking because he showed that the speed at which something happens can change its essential nature. He also said somewhere that the possession of territory is mainly about movement and circulation. That’s also a central point in Elisa’s argument, along with other theorists such as Ross Exo Adams, who analyze modernity through mobility and circulation.

Do you think there is now an overabundance of development that is out of touch with the actual needs of society? How perniciously has green capitalism impacted the industry, and how do you want to present this idea in the course of your exhibition?

There are way too many developments that are absolutely out of touch with society. The regime of building is deeply flawed, especially in large metropolises. Projects are built as tools of financial investment, not for anyone’s needs. That’s what needs to change, and of course, that’s not easy to change. We need a different way of thinking about the whole process—not just whether a façade has green on it or not. The ongoing waterfront development in Williamsburg is a perfect example of the pernicious mechanism in place. The rezoning of a low-density area for two additional 60 and 65-story towers while most of Williamsburg residents are against it; the hypocrisy of promoting that the project is resilient and responsible when the carbon footprint of building the towers far exceeds any offset the microgrid or the wastewater reuse system can provide. This project is just one among thousands showing how architecture is instrumentalized in distorting reality for the benefit of the financial class today. Is there an easy way out? Unfortunately, not.

What other things do you want to be part of the exhibition? What's your vision for it in the end?

Well, we are still at the early stages of trying to find out what to do. Right now, we are reading and talking a lot. We are thinking about starting a series of public events in the upcoming months around carbon form. We think of this exhibition as a process first, and an end-result second. In that sense, the year and a half we have until the opening is an opportunity to create a public platform for sharing and exchanging ideas. This will be done in the format of lectures and public conversations and other methods we are currently thinking about. Stay tuned!