Gökhan Kodalak

Gökhan Kodalak is an architect, instructing architecture and design studios at Parsons School of Design; a theorist, teaching philosophies of architecture, nature, and cities at Pratt Institute; and an architectural historian holding a Ph.D. from and teaching specialized seminars at Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. His work explores architectural ontology and cybernetic epistemology, design ecology and nature-architecture continuum, spatial politics and urban commons, affective aesthetics and immanent ethics, and the heterodox Spinozist conception that architectural modalities are alive [animata].

Kodalak's research is awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Institute for Comparative Modernities. His design work is acknowledged with international awards and exhibited at the Johnson Museum of Art in New York, Antalya Architecture Biennial, and Plovdiv One Architecture Week. He is a recipient of the Theories of Architecture fellowship at TU Delft, and a frequent speaker at international conferences and invited talks at SCI-Arc (L.A.), Ecologías Afectivas (Madrid), and the European Society for Aesthetics at Freie Universität (Berlin).

Kodalak's discourse is published in peer-reviewed journals such as Deleuze Studies, Footprint, and Interstices, and books including Spinoza's Philosophy of Ratio (2018), Architectures of Life and Death (2021), and The Rise of the Common City (2022). Most recently, Kodalak guest edited a multi-issue publication project at Log, bringing together the understudied thinking of Spinoza, A.N. Whitehead, and Gilbert Simondon with the aesthetic production of David Foster Wallace, László Moholy-Nagy, and Vogelkop bowerbirds, so as to cultivate alternative approaches to the interfused questions of philosophy, nature, and design.

Classes (Selected)

• ARCH 3819/5819 Nature-Architecture Continuum

Awards, Grants, and Fellowships (Selected)

• TU Delft Theories of Architecture Fellowship (2021)
• Canadian Center for Architecture Research Fellowship (2016)
• Arts & Humanities Research Council Grant (2015)

Exhibitions and Presentations (Selected)

• Uncommon River, public exhibition at One Architecture Week, Plovdiv (2015)
• Open-Source Architecture: Open-Cube, urban installation at the 2nd Int'l Antalya Architecture Biennial, Antalya (2013)
• Projecting Cities, public exhibition curation at the Herbert Johnson Museum of Art, New York (2012)

Publications (Selected)

• "Simondon, the Question of Technology, and the Architectural Margin of Indeterminacy," Footprint Delft Architecture Theory Journal (Spring/Summer 2022)
• "Urban Commonality and Architectural Singularity," in Rise of the Common City: On the Culture of Commoning, eds. T. Lijster, L. Volont, and P. Gielen (Brussels: ASP, 2022)
• "From Architecture Lifeless to Architecture Alive," in Architectures of Life and Death: The Eco-Aesthetics of the Built Environment, eds. A. Radman & S. Kousoulas (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021)
• "Lines, Tornadoes, and David Foster Wallace," Log 51 (Spring 2021)
• "Affective Aesthetics beneath Art and Architecture: Deleuze, Francis Bacon and Bowerbirds," Deleuze and Guattari Studies Journal (August 2018)
• "Spinoza, Heterarchical Ontology and Affective Architecture," in Spinoza's Philosophy of Ratio, ed. Beth Lord (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018)