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


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2026




Sub-terranean, Sur-terranean


Location: Süleymaniye, Istanbul
Type: Academic, group+individual
Level: Bachelors, 4th Year, ARCH 401
Date: 2022 Fall
Study: Urban intervention, dwelling, anthrposcene landscapes

Institution: Istanbul Bilgi University

Sub-terranean, sur-terranean settles in the Süleymaniye region of Istanbul and interprets such notions as anthropocene, heterotopia, hegemony, critical urban landscaping and experimental city. In “sub-terranean, sur-terranean” site plan did produce as group work, gathering 3 individual projects in landscape and urban scale. 

anthroposcene (def.)

Unofficial unit of geologic time used to describe the period in earth’s history when human activity started to have a impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. Thinking of archeological value of Süleymaniye, understanding what is underneath the site, there were mostly cisterns and cellars. Undertaking the vertical acknoledge of the city, the idea of the anthroposcene, these subterrenean spaces were functioning for storage. Considering what humankind was storing back than and what humankind store today, underground territories were re-claimed as observation sites for existing figure and widened to be data centers. Data centres were not only to represent the idea of stocking but to create a green energy infrastructure. While storing and developing data, data centers do produce much of waste heat. The project suggest to use this waste energy as the heating resource for the housing on the existing layer of the city. The projected dormitory also do uses the energy of the data center. The dormitory has a lightweight and temporary grid structure; including infrastructural components, common areas and housing units. Contrast in the structures of the data centre/observatory and dormitory narrates the permanance of underground and temporariness of overground.