Res. Asst. Nilsu ALTUNOK

Biography

I was born in 1998 in Ankara, Türkiye. I completed my high school education at TED Ankara College Scholar Development Program in 2016. After high school, I moved to Istanbul and started my bachelor's degree education. I have been working in the Department of Architecture at Yildiz Technical University as a research assistant since 2021 and assisting many courses in the Bachelor and Graduate Programs of Architecture at the same university as a teaching assistant. I graduated from Yildiz Technical University, Department of Architecture, where I studied between 2016-2020, as valedictorian. I completed my Architectural Design master’s education at the end of the spring semester of 2023 at Istanbul Technical University. My master's degree was funded by my country's scientific research support organisation (TUBITAK).

In my master’s research, I mainly focused on architectural theory in the axis of critical theory, post-structuralist feminist theories, and architectural representation possibilities. In connection with my research, I participated in the conference "Tacit Knowledge in Architecture" at ETH Zurich in June 2023 and presented a full paper titled, "Revealing the Tacit: A Critical Spatial Practice Based on Walking and Re/presenting". My dissertation attempted to uncover the ways of expressing the state of being critical while performing everyday life acts in the city and representing these performances with the ‘other’ ways of architectural representation.

In December 2023, a pavilion design proposal that we worked on with Anıl Yavuz was presented at the "Posthuman Symbioses Masterclass: A Thinking with Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti" organised by the Chair of Philosophy and Theory of Architecture at the TU Delft Department of Architecture. Another research-by-design study I am involved in approaches the Anthropocene from a new materialist perspective on ecological sensitivities and has been accepted for presentation at the conference "Production Studies International Conference" at Newcastle University next March. As a native Turkish speaker, I am multilingual and speak English (advanced level), German (intermediate level) and Spanish (beginner).