2025

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25 Haziran 2025 Çarşamba

ARDW - Analogue Resistance of Design Webs

 

Theme

In an era of production increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and algorithms, this event invites participants to explore the critical, creative, and resistant potentials of analogue design practices. Bringing together scholars, artists and practitioners from the fields of architecture, art, media, and technology, the gathering opens up an interdisciplinary platform to discuss the tensions between analogue and digital. 

 

Program

10:30—Welcoming

Morning Session: AI, computation, and synthetic imagination

10:45—Openning Short Keynote by Refik Anadol

11:00—Alien Intelligence: An Introduction to AI for Architects by Neil Leach

12:00—Synthetic Dialogues: AI Across Disciplines and Dimensions by Asena Kumsal Şen Bayram

12:30—Roundtable discussion moderated by Serdar Aydin

Break

Afternoon Session: Computational architecture and analogue design

14:00—Short Keynote by Melike Altınışık

14:15—Architecture as a Mesopotamian Matter by Bünyamin Atan

14:45—past/future/present by Ömer Selçuk Baz

15:15—Roundtable discussion moderated by H. Tuba Bölük

 

Place

Sakıp Sabancı Mardin City Museum

Şehidiye Mh., Hükümet Cd. No:10, 47100 Artuklu/Mardin, Türkiye

 

Host

Mimari Proje Üretimi Uygulama ve Araştırma Merkezi (Mimfab), Mardin Artuklu University

 

 

SPEAKERS

Refik Anadol

   

Refik Anadol is a media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of machine intelligence. His work explores the intersection of art, science, and technology, using data and AI as primary materials  to create immersive environments and sculptural data narratives. Founder of Refik Anadol Studio, he is known for site-specific installations such as Machine Hallucinations and WDCH Dreams. Anadol’s projects have been exhibited at MoMA, Ars Electronica, Centre Pompidou, and the Venice Architecture Biennale. His work challenges our perceptions of space, memory, and consciousness in the age of algorithms and synthetic realities.

  

Neil Leach

 

Neil Leach is a professor of architecture from the UK. He directs the Doctor of Design program at FIU, and has also taught at the AA, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, IaaC and SCI-Arc. He is a co-founder of DigitalFUTURES, and a former researcher for NASA developing a 3D printer for the Moon and Mars. He has published over 50 books, including most recently, Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction to AI for Architects (2nd edition, Bloomsbury, 2025) Instagram: @neilleach14

Alien Intelligence: An Introduction to AI for Architects

Everyone is talking about AI these days. But what exactly is AI? How did it evolve? And what potential does it have to influence the future? This lecture takes you on a roller coaster ride looking at the extraordinary – but often somewhat terrifying – potential of what is arguably the most significant invention of humankind. The lecture concludes that we are about to face a radically different form of intelligence – an ‘alien intelligence’ – that will far exceed human intelligence, and completely transform the discipline of architecture.

 

Asena Kumsal Şen Bayram

 

Asena Kumsal Şen Bayram received her BArch (2007), MSc (2009), and PhD (2015) degrees in Architectural Design from Istanbul Technical University. During her graduate studies, she co-founded an R&D company in ITU ARI Technopark, where she worked as a project manager and designer on various architectural design and construction projects. She has taught as a part-time instructor at several universities, and since 2019, she has been a full-time faculty member at the Faculty of Architecture and Design, Maltepe University. Her current research interests include digital design and fabrication techniques, artificial intelligence, gaming, and serious games in architecture and design education.

Synthetic Dialogues: AI Across Disciplines and Scales

This presentation explores artificial intelligence not merely as a tool, but as a medium for synthetic dialogues — facilitating the convergence of disciplines, co-creation of knowledge, and the design of multi-scalar systems. Informed by dialogism, assemblage theory, and transdisciplinary epistemologies, AI becomes a dynamic site of interaction across pedagogical, architectural, and simulated environments. The talk highlights how AI enables a priori synthesis — creating new conceptual spaces where humans and machines collaboratively generate meaning — through interdisciplinary projects at various scales.

 

Melik Altınışık

   

Melike Altınışık is an award-winning architect, designer, and educator known for her visionary approach to future-oriented architecture and design technologies. She is the founder of Melike Altınışık Architects (MAA), an internationally recognized studio based in Istanbul. Her work integrates architecture, technology, and nature, often exploring computational design and material innovation. Notable projects include the Istanbul TV and Radio Tower and the Robot Science Museum in Seoul. Altınışık’s practice focuses on spatial experimentation at the intersection of science and art, offering critical perspectives on digital design culture and emerging technologies in architecture.

 

Bünyamin Atan

 

Bünyamin Atan was born in Mardin, where he completed his primary and high school education. He went to Eskişehir for his architecture education. After graduating in 2018, he became a part of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Seeing local and national productions together, he decided to produce Istanbul-based architecture. He received awards from competitions of various scales. He gained jury experience in competitions and schools. In 2021, he founded Hiza Architecture in Istanbul.

Architecture as a Mesopotamian Matter

Being born in Mesopotamia and producing there is both a chance and a burden. In order to make the right production, sometimes questions are more valuable than answers. How much can we include topics such as History/Culture/Atmosphere in life? How can we regain our role in history with the super-identity of belonging with today's principles that build the space? How should we discuss what geography has lost and what it has gained in today's architecture?

 

Ömer Selçuk Baz

 

Ömer Selçuk Baz was born in 1978 in Nuremberg, Germany, and completed his early education in Antakya. After graduating from Uludağ University in 2002, he pursued graduate studies at TU Vienna while working at Atelier Stelzhammer. In 2005, he won first prize in the Central Bank of Turkey Bursa Branch competition and began practicing architecture in Turkey. As a founding partner of Yalın Architecture, he has led award-winning projects including the Central Bank HQ, Troy Museum, Riyadh Mosque, and Korean War Memorial. He has received multiple National Architecture Awards, the European 40 Under 40 Award, and UNESCO’s Sustainable Architecture Prize in 2022.

past/future/present

From where should we approach space, and how should we construct it? Should we think of space starting from the past, moving toward the future, or by reflecting on the present? Is it shaped by a geographic marker, a local element, social behavior patterns, or construction techniques? As one of the fundamental indicators of human civilization, space has always been constructed in relation to a specific notion of time. But which time? And today, what are the components and possibilities that define how we conceive and build space?

 

MODERATORS

Serdar Aydın

Serdar Aydin is an architect, researcher and designer whose work navigates between digital culture, design intelligence and participatory systems. His cross-continental trajectory—spanning Turkey, China, the UK, and Aotearoa New Zealand—informs a pluralistic and critical approach to computational design. His research engages parametric and algorithmic methods, virtual reality, smart city and interaction design, centering on the co-evolution of human and machine agency rather than detached digitalism. Aydin received the Design Research Society Award (2014), the YoungCAADRIA Award (2015), was honored Second Prize in Turkey’s Natural Stone Design Competition (2021), and worked with Zaha Hadid Architects on the parametric articulation of Changsha Meixihu International Culture and Arts Centre.

 

H. Tuba Bölük

Tuba Bölük is a researcher at the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at Mardin Artuklu University, currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Antwerp. Her work focuses on the interdisciplinary and contextual study of construction knowledge and engineering history in Ottoman modernity, particularly during the 19th and early 20th centuries. After earning an MSc from TU Wien, she explores how local building practices and participatory processes of making, repairing, and constructing intersected with emerging forms of scientific and technical knowledge in the Ottoman Empire. Her research sits at the intersection of construction history, architectural theory, and urban history, with a particular interest in how embodied forms of expertise evolved and adapted within shifting narratives of modernization.

 

ORGANISATION

 

Team

Serdar Aydın (Mardin Artuklu University, Türkiye)

H. Tuba Bölük (Mardin Artuklu University, Türkiye)

Zeynep Özge Yalçın (Izmir Institute of Technology, Türkiye)

Figen Işıker (Mardin Artuklu University, Türkiye)

 

Sister Organisations

Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, MAU

Faculty of Fine Arts, MAU

 

Acknowledgement

Architecture Students, MAU

İzzettin Kutlu (Website)

2025

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Wednesday, 9 April 2025

 

Prof. Dr. Khalil Valizadeh Kamran from Iran's University of Tabriz held a seminar at our Faculty!

 

Professor Dr. Khalil Valizadeh Kamran, an academic from Iran's University of Tabriz, visited our university. During this visit, discussions were held regarding future collaborations. A seminar titled ‘GIS and Remote Sensing for Earthquake Risk Management in Urban Planning’ was held with the participation of academics from the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture and students.

 

  

 

We would like to express our gratitude for his kind visit and informative presentation.