Social housing. Detention centres. Schools for refugee camps. Ipek Türeli’s students are passionate about the role these buildings play in our society.
Teaching future architects at McGill, Türeli has grown increasingly interested in how architects themselves can foster a more just world. An associate professor in McGill’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture and Canada Research Chair in Architectures of Spatial Justice, for Türeli teaching and research inform one another.
“Students’ interests have led me to explore new areas or develop interests that I already had. I’ve had opportunities to develop courses related to my research interests, and I’ve developed courses where I thought there was a need in our curriculum and then my research shifted in that direction. It’s been very productive for me,” she says.
Professor Ipek Türeli with graduate students (from left) Ayca Koseoglu, Utku Karakaya, Ella den Elzen and Mathilde Chauvin-Amyot.
For Türeli it’s important to get her students reflecting on their profession. For example, in her undergraduate Architectural History class, she provokes students by showing them racially segregated institutional and public architectures of the apartheid era in South Africa, as well as Nazi concentration camps in Europe.
She asks them to speculate on whether the architects understood what they were doing, whether they endorsed their patron’s views, and to consider what the students would do in their place. Such discussions invariably lead the students to think about contemporary inequalities and how they are manifest through the built environment.
“Every year there’s a huge debate. We have all sorts of discussions. I like to have the opportunity to have tense discussions. The students are so engaged,” she says.
Prior to coming to McGill in 2012, Türeli completed her doctoral studies at UC Berkeley, and practiced architecture in Turkey and the UK. She taught at Middle East Technical University in Ankara as well as at Berkeley and Brown. Her research into urban representations culminated in a book, Istanbul, Open City: Exhibiting Anxieties of Urban Modernity.
Activism and architecture
When given a blank slate for a second-year studio class, Türeli felt compelled to educate students about the crisis in Syria, which at the time wasn’t well covered in Canada. Originally from Turkey, Türeli was acutely aware of the situation.
“The UN and many NGOs were pitching it as a crisis of future generations because when people are displaced with their children, the children can’t go to school. What you observe in Turkey is refugee children supporting families with extremely low wages … so I formulated this project around school design on the border of Turkey and Syria.”
She invited members of NGOs who work on schools for Syrian refugee children to come and speak with the class. She also invited experts from campus, including Megan Bradley, founder of the McGill Refugee Research Group.
Türeli exposed the students to the United Nations’ existing prefabricated schools and asked them in turn to design schools that were “more sensitive to the region and more playful,” she explains.
“The students were overwhelmed and very moved” by everything they learned, recalls Türeli. After the class was completed, some students volunteered to put up an exhibition of their work, and fundraised for one of the NGOs, Syrian Kids Foundation.
Türeli gave a similar studio course the following year, but the focus shifted and this time instead of a prefabricated school, she asked the students to propose a design for a new building for the actual site where the Syrian Kids Foundation currently has their school.
The class looked at school design more globally, including by visiting and studying a public school in Montreal that had its own architectural problems.
“We saw a student who missed classes because he was in a wheelchair … public schools in Montreal aren’t universally designed. So seeing that, it helped the students think about the mandate to design universally. And they tied it back to schools in their own city,” explains Türeli.
For the students, the project not only opened their minds to issues around architecture, education and justice, but also informed future career choices.
Students for spatial justice
Some of her students, especially those at the graduate level, are already very much dedicated to social justice, and have come to McGill to study with Türeli.
One of them is Master of Architecture student Ella den Elzen, who is looking at the role of the architect in refugee detention centres that Canada is currently building in Laval, Quebec. Den Elzen is studying the design and function of the buildings, and how people are treated inside them. For her thesis, she is designing an exhibition to inform the public and generate debate on the issue.
Another of Türeli’s master’s students, Mathilde Chauvin-Amyot, is looking at women’s housing and feminist architectural ideologies. Chauvin-Amyot is working for Türeli on a documentary film on the history of low-income housing cooperatives for women in Canada.
Facilitating this work is a new lab funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation at the School of Architecture. Initiated by Türeli and her Architecture colleague David Theodore, the facility is developing emerging digital methods for research: for example, ways to use 3D laser scans together with digital stories.
The role of collaboration
Another example of the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration that is typical of much of Türeli’s work is a conference she co-organized at McGill with Tassos Anastassiadis, associate professor of History and Phrixos B. Papachristidis Chair in Modern Greek Studies: “School-Time!” which had a geographic focus on the eastern Mediterranean. The event brought together historians of education, who don’t typically study the spaces where education takes place, and historians of architecture, who don’t typically focus on educational buildings and facilities. Türeli is currently working on a book-length manuscript on American colleges in the eastern Mediterranean.
She is also the coordinator of the Democracy, Space, and Technology research group at the Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds at McGill, where she helps organize talks and workshops.
“This is what academia is supposed to be,” says Türeli, about her students and colleagues. “It’s so great to be surrounded by scholars interested in similar research issues, who are engaged with what I’m teaching and researching.”