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.