Elâ Kaçel
Bio
Elâ Kaçel was born in Istanbul, Turkey and attended the Österreichisches St. Georgs-Kolleg Istanbul in Galata. She received a Bachelor of Architecture from Yıldız Technical University in 1995, and her thesis design project – a sailing school in Anadoluhisarı – was published in the journal Tasarım. Elâ continued to the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, earning a Master of Arts from the Housing and Urbanism Programme in 1997. She completed her graduate thesis, entitled The Changing Context of Housing Standards in Britain: From Parker Morris Report to ‘2000 Homes’ Project, under the supervision of Dr. Nicholas Bullock. Returning to Yıldız, Elâ earned a Master of Science in Architecture under Dr. İhsan Bilgin while serving as an assistant in the field of Housing and Building Management.
In 2000, Elâ was awarded a NATO Science Fellowship from the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), which allowed her to conduct independent research at Columbia University in New York. In 2002, Elâ was awarded a Sage Fellowship from the History of Architecture and Urban Development Program at Cornell University to begin doctoral work in Ithaca, New York. She was later awarded a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Fellowship from the American Research Institute in Turkey to conduct archival research and interviews in Ankara, Marmaris, and Istanbul. Elâ completed her dissertation at Cornell, entitled Intellectualism and Consumerism: Ideologies, Practices and Criticisms of Common Sense Modernism in Postwar Turkey, which she defended in June 2008. Her committee was chaired by Dr. Christian Otto, and members included Dr. Susan Buck-Morss, Dr. Dominic Boyer, and Dr. Sibel Bozdoğan of the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
In her research, Elâ considers the role of intellectuals in the context of social change, taking into regard the role of cultural politics and consumerism in professional life. She engages with the history of modern Turkish architecture and the lack of criticism within postwar modernism in light of the methodologies of cultural anthropology, the sociology of knowledge, and critical theory. Her interests range from historiography of modern art and architecture to visual studies, and from professionalism to propaganda and the production of culture.
Elâ Kaçel currently teaches the history of architecture and the history of interior design as well design studio in the Faculty of Architecture and Design at Bahçeşehir University in Beşiktaş, Istanbul.
Downloads
(All documents are formatted for ISO A4 paper)
- Curriculum Vitæ
- “Information or Culture: The Intelligentsia and the Dissemination of Postwar Modernism in Turkey” American Research Institute in Turkey Lecture Series, Istanbul, 20 November 2006.
- “OMA/AMO Whose Utopia?” Translation and revision of “OMA/AMO Kimin Ütopyası?” Arkitera, 23 May 2005.
- “Rethinking Ordinary Architecture in Postwar Turkey” VIII International DOCOMOMO Conference, Columbia University in the City of New York, 29 September to 2 October 2004.
- “Rethinking Public vs. Private: ‘The Istanbul Hilton and Its Beyond’” pp 487–92 in Contribution and Confusion: Architecture and the Influence of Other Fields of Inquiry. Proceedings of the 2003 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) International Conference, Helsinki, 27–30 July 2003. Washington DC: ACSA Press, 2004.