2026





NEWS



Anatomy of Inspiration

I was a keynote speaker at the 18th Istanbul Biennial (2025) for the Anatomy of Inspiration talk series!

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Tactical Urbanism Now!
Our project From Soil to Soil: Stitching the Food Cycle through Landscapes and Cultures, with Fernando Sanchez for the Tactical Urbanism Now! competition by TerraViva, was selected as one of the finalists!

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ABOUT
Zeynep Igmen is an architect and researcher specializing in sustainable and socially just architectural and urban practices, based in London and Istanbul. Her work engages with cultural discourses, environmental history, territorial conflicts across land- and waterscapes, and their intersections with material and immaterial cultures. She also explores spatial tectonics and hands-on, low-tech making. In parallel, she contributes to the Latinization of Ottoman Turkish documents and literature.

The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL 2024-2025
MA Architecture and Historic Urban Environments 

          thesis titled “A Practice of Fishing along the Bosphorus: Mapping Dalyans as Sites of Collective Making and Memory”

Uskudar University 2024-2025
MA Sufi Culture and Literature

           final project titled “Tawakkul, Vigour, and Building in the Narrative of Prophet Noah”


Istanbul Bilgi University 2019-2023
BArch Architecture (High Honours)

London College of Music 2007-2022
Classical Piano, Grade 8


Curriculum Vitae


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2026




“boom”


Location: Merkezefendi, Istanbul
Type: Academic, individual
Level: Bachelors, Final project, ARCH 402
Date: 2023 Spring
Study: Data center, narrative, parasite

Institution: Istanbul Bilgi University

“BOOM” is a response for the input of generating a data center which also includes a digital art museum and an education center of data management. Since, in approach of the project, humankind is thought of as aliens of technology, even though we are in 21st century, project sets around a monolith which imagined to be fall to the selected area from space. Along with the narrative, humankind parasits around the monolith with required components by help of both permenant and temporary cranes. Component configuration is an output sequence of some selected data such as how many tb of data are being stored or how many data are being processed in the center which allows the system to have infinite alternatives of arrengements. Monolith was enhanced with a permanent mega-infrastructure around which components do plug themselves along with their own secondary infrastructures of cooling or power distribution elements. Accordingly, every component has their own spatial units and mechanic systems.The structureand its system allows mechanism to be reduced and augmented along with the functional needs and set periods. The vertical approach enables site to be used as a public recreation plane with the help of its landscapes.