Alican Taylan

Alican Taylan is a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell’s History of Architecture and Urban Development (HAUD) and an adjunct professor at Illinois Institute of Technology, College of Architecture. His research studies the intersections of architecture and environmental history in the nineteenth century with a focus on the Sahel. Methodologically, he is interested in transimperial histories of intertwined architectural development and microhistory as an ahistoriographical approach. Recently, he curated Strategic Landforms (2024), an exhibition about military architectural production in French Senegal over the nineteenth century, which questioned the role of colonial infrastructure in modernization processes in West Africa. Alican is also an architect (M.Arch.) and engineer (MEng). From 2018 to 2022, he was a visiting assistant professor in Pratt Institute’s graduate architecture program, teaching in the studio sequence. He contributed to various exhibitions, including co-curating Confronting Carbon Form (2023), first shown at The Cooper Union, which explored innovative disciplinary approaches to addressing environmental concerns in architecture. He was a cocurator of the exhibition Aesthetics of Prosthetics (2019) at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture. He contributed to the 2018 Turkish pavilion at the Venice Biennale. His work has been supported by grants from institutions including the Architectural League, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Graham Foundation, the Institute for European Studies, the Einaudi Center at Cornell University, the Cornell Council for the Arts, and Pratt Institute. His writing and work have been featured in various journals, periodicals, and coedited volumes, including Log, Metropolis Magazine, and Mimar.ist, NYRA, Plat, and The Architect’s Newspaper. He previously worked in the offices of architects Peter Eisenman, Shigeru Ban, and Thomas Leeser.