An Architect Walks Istanbul’s Streets, Pondering the Known & Unknown

Room: History, Biography & Religion, 2nd Floor

What might compel us to learn from immersing ourselves inside a city? This walking narrative conjures an experience that invites the listener to explore and sense the complex, built environment of the millennia-old yet modern and global Istanbul. The city’s diverse rhythms of sounds, scents, and crowds; the quiet intimacies of tight spaces; and the sublime beauty of hilly, collaged distant views of monuments and daily life are also defined by colliding Western and Eastern attitudes that reveal crisscrossing infrastructures.

Alison B. Snyder is a professor/architect/artist/researcher, teaching at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Her work is informed by overlaps and intersections seen and felt between architecture, art, interiors, and context. Drawing upon architectural theory, and archaeological and anthropological methods to reveal why places, buildings, interiors, and people transform over time, she has conducted urban and rural fieldwork in Turkey and New York City. Never planning to be a repeat traveler to Istanbul, Snyder first visited in 1986 during graduate school, and has since returned many times to walk, study, and interpret the illusive city.