Ufuk Ersoy
Ufuk Ersoy teaches architecture in Clemson School of Architecture. Before Clemson, Ersoy taught at the University of New South Wales (2001-2016), University of Pennsylvania (2002) and Izmir Institute of Technology (2002-2012).
Ersoy completed his M. Arch., M.S. in Architectural History and Theory, and Ph.D. in Architecture degrees at the University of Pennsylvania. During his graduate studies, he won James Smith Warner Memorial Prize for “outstanding work in architectural design.” His doctoral dissertation, “Seeing through Glass: The Fictive Role of Glass in Shaping Architecture from Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace to Bruno Taut’s Glashaus” compares the glass cultures of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Parts of his dissertation have been published in proceedings and journals.
In 2010, Ersoy co-edited a special issue of the journal World Architecture on "Architecture in Turkey: A Glocal Production," with Dr. Sebnem Yucel. In 2015, he acted as the primary editor of 100 Years of Clemson Architecture: Southern Roots + Global Reach, Centennial Proceedings. Most recently, he has published his essay “Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper: Transfiguration through Glass, or Vertical and Horizontal Transparencies: Mies van der Rohe,” in Companions to the History of Architecture Volume IV, edited by D. Leatherbarrow and A. Eisenschmidt. He has been invited to give lectures in different schools of art and architecture such as Newcastle University, Seoul National University, Virginia Tech, University of Maryland, College of Charleston and Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center.
Apart from his scholarly work, Ersoy participated in many architectural competitions with Clarissa Mendez. In 2010, he won a prize in Izmir Opera House competition in collaboration with Tozkoparan Architects, Izmir and Ove Arup, London.
Address: Clemson University
School of Architecture
3-115 Lee Hall
Clemson, SC 29634
USA
Ersoy completed his M. Arch., M.S. in Architectural History and Theory, and Ph.D. in Architecture degrees at the University of Pennsylvania. During his graduate studies, he won James Smith Warner Memorial Prize for “outstanding work in architectural design.” His doctoral dissertation, “Seeing through Glass: The Fictive Role of Glass in Shaping Architecture from Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace to Bruno Taut’s Glashaus” compares the glass cultures of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Parts of his dissertation have been published in proceedings and journals.
In 2010, Ersoy co-edited a special issue of the journal World Architecture on "Architecture in Turkey: A Glocal Production," with Dr. Sebnem Yucel. In 2015, he acted as the primary editor of 100 Years of Clemson Architecture: Southern Roots + Global Reach, Centennial Proceedings. Most recently, he has published his essay “Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper: Transfiguration through Glass, or Vertical and Horizontal Transparencies: Mies van der Rohe,” in Companions to the History of Architecture Volume IV, edited by D. Leatherbarrow and A. Eisenschmidt. He has been invited to give lectures in different schools of art and architecture such as Newcastle University, Seoul National University, Virginia Tech, University of Maryland, College of Charleston and Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center.
Apart from his scholarly work, Ersoy participated in many architectural competitions with Clarissa Mendez. In 2010, he won a prize in Izmir Opera House competition in collaboration with Tozkoparan Architects, Izmir and Ove Arup, London.
Address: Clemson University
School of Architecture
3-115 Lee Hall
Clemson, SC 29634
USA
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Book by Ufuk Ersoy
Clemson University Press, 2015, ISBN 978-1-942954-07-1
Edited by Ufuk Ersoy, Dana Anderson and Kate Schwennsen
This book documents most of the events held in 2013 under the title of 100 Years of Clemson Architecture: Southern Roots + Global Reach to celebrate the Clemson University School of Architecture’s Centennial. The celebration events started in March with a four-campus meeting to honor the fortieth anniversary of the Charles E. Daniel Center for Building Research and Urban Studies in Genoa, Italy, founded in 1973 (The Villa at 40) and the thirteenth anniversary of the Barcelona Architecture Center (Barcelona at 13). In May, the Clemson Architecture Center in Charleston (CACC) hosted sessions of the South Carolina American Institute of Architects (SCAIA) Annual Conference in honor of its twenty-fiffth anniversary (CACC at 25). In August, events continued with the “2013 South Atlantic Region Architecture for Health Annual Conference and School of Architecture Centennial Symposia,” organized to celebrate the forty-fifth year of the Architecture and Health Program (A+H at 45). The Centennial Symposium of “The Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization” and Beaux-Arts Ball in October were the final events concluding the centennial celebrations of “Southern Roots + Global Reach.” Throughout the 2013–14 academic year, two exhibitions, “Southern Roots + Global Reach: 100 Years of Clemson Architecture” and “Grassroots,” and a series of lectures given by some accomplished alumni and former professors of the school accompanied these events.
Accessible online through the following link:
http://www.clemson.edu/caah/cedp/press/pubs/100years/2015/index.html
Book Chapters by Ufuk Ersoy
Essays by Ufuk Ersoy
Conference Presentations and Proceedings by Ufuk Ersoy
Is an interactive wall still possible? This is an important question that has occupied the agenda of contemporary architects. Nevertheless, most of the answers given by pragmatic starchitects of the twenty-first century remain within the frame of visual and instrumental thinking and recall the spectacular nineteenth-century Crystal Palace which epitomized a paradigm for the twentieth-century myth of permeable transparent wall. To understand what an interactive wall is or used to be, this presentation calls attention back to the nineteenth century and delves into the remote yet tense dispute between two important bourgeois figures of London, the well-known architecture critic John Ruskin and the gardener Joseph Paxton who built the Crystal Palace. While, for Paxton, transparent glass was an excellent instrument to measure and control the interior, for Ruskin who refused to step in the Crystal Palace, it denied the theatricality of architecture. The Crystal Palace was a heterotopia that gave clues about two exclusive objectives of modern society: hedonism and comfort.
Organization: Society for Utopian Studies Annual Meeting, “Harbors and Islands: Explorations of Utopia, Past and Present,” St. Petersburg, FL, October 27-30, 2016.
Ufuk Ersoy, Clemson University
In these days, the dependence on non-renewable energy sources and the related
ecological crisis have come to occupy public consciousness. In popular culture,
environmental anxieties have lead many to instantly dream of a ‘more natural’
future, and have urged many architects to reconsider the dualisms of inside/outside
and natural/artificial at the center of modern thinking. In response to this
pervading phantasmagoria of green architecture, this paper calls back a seminal
paradigm at the roots of modern architecture: the Crystal Palace designed and
built by the gardener Joseph Paxton in 1851. Different from the historical accounts
which have generally described the building as the outstanding milestone in the
development of dry construction methods and frame structures, this paper will
call attention to Paxton’s overlooked gardening background. In particular, the
paper will examine Paxton’s ambition to imitate nature and to bring it into the
industrial city. In methodological terms, using Michel Foucault’s theory of ‘heterotopia,’
the paper will suggest an alternative reading of the Crystal Palace far form
technological determinism.
Paxton himself admitted that the idea of the Crystal Palace derived from the Lily
House he had constructed in 1850. In the Lily House, the gardener was attracted to
the fictive opacity of glass. For him, the transparent glass envelope was an instrument
to measure and control the physical qualities of interior space. It allowed
him to reinterpret the act of ‘cultivating’ as an artificial gesture which converted
nature into a complete work of art. In other words, the transparent glass enclosure
enabled Paxton to pass over the material aspects of reality in order to achieve a
contact with the natural truth and to manipulate it. But, In his Lily House experiment,
Paxton was not interested in a continuity between inside and outside, or nature
and society. Rather, the main objective of the hothouse was to transcend the
local conditions; it was a ‘natural fiction’ built to relocate and regenerate unknown
species collected from distant places. Read from a Foucauldian standpoint, the
hothouse deserves to be called a heterotopia; it was a gap isolated from its context
to serve both to control and to represent its ‘foreign’ occupants. Unsurprisingly,
the Crystal Palace was similarly built to safely exhibit two strange entities of the
period: industrial objects and distant cultures. Investigating the fictive role Paxton
assigned to transparent glass, this paper does not only intend to reveal the heterotopic
nature of the nineteenth-century hothouse, but also prepares the ground for
the criticism of the contemporary trend associating transparent ‘biospheres’ with
the notion of environment-friendly architecture.
Dissertation by Ufuk Ersoy
Conference Pres. and Proceedings (Co-author) by Ufuk Ersoy
Papers by Ufuk Ersoy
Clemson University Press, 2015, ISBN 978-1-942954-07-1
Edited by Ufuk Ersoy, Dana Anderson and Kate Schwennsen
This book documents most of the events held in 2013 under the title of 100 Years of Clemson Architecture: Southern Roots + Global Reach to celebrate the Clemson University School of Architecture’s Centennial. The celebration events started in March with a four-campus meeting to honor the fortieth anniversary of the Charles E. Daniel Center for Building Research and Urban Studies in Genoa, Italy, founded in 1973 (The Villa at 40) and the thirteenth anniversary of the Barcelona Architecture Center (Barcelona at 13). In May, the Clemson Architecture Center in Charleston (CACC) hosted sessions of the South Carolina American Institute of Architects (SCAIA) Annual Conference in honor of its twenty-fiffth anniversary (CACC at 25). In August, events continued with the “2013 South Atlantic Region Architecture for Health Annual Conference and School of Architecture Centennial Symposia,” organized to celebrate the forty-fifth year of the Architecture and Health Program (A+H at 45). The Centennial Symposium of “The Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization” and Beaux-Arts Ball in October were the final events concluding the centennial celebrations of “Southern Roots + Global Reach.” Throughout the 2013–14 academic year, two exhibitions, “Southern Roots + Global Reach: 100 Years of Clemson Architecture” and “Grassroots,” and a series of lectures given by some accomplished alumni and former professors of the school accompanied these events.
Accessible online through the following link:
http://www.clemson.edu/caah/cedp/press/pubs/100years/2015/index.html
Is an interactive wall still possible? This is an important question that has occupied the agenda of contemporary architects. Nevertheless, most of the answers given by pragmatic starchitects of the twenty-first century remain within the frame of visual and instrumental thinking and recall the spectacular nineteenth-century Crystal Palace which epitomized a paradigm for the twentieth-century myth of permeable transparent wall. To understand what an interactive wall is or used to be, this presentation calls attention back to the nineteenth century and delves into the remote yet tense dispute between two important bourgeois figures of London, the well-known architecture critic John Ruskin and the gardener Joseph Paxton who built the Crystal Palace. While, for Paxton, transparent glass was an excellent instrument to measure and control the interior, for Ruskin who refused to step in the Crystal Palace, it denied the theatricality of architecture. The Crystal Palace was a heterotopia that gave clues about two exclusive objectives of modern society: hedonism and comfort.
Organization: Society for Utopian Studies Annual Meeting, “Harbors and Islands: Explorations of Utopia, Past and Present,” St. Petersburg, FL, October 27-30, 2016.
Ufuk Ersoy, Clemson University
In these days, the dependence on non-renewable energy sources and the related
ecological crisis have come to occupy public consciousness. In popular culture,
environmental anxieties have lead many to instantly dream of a ‘more natural’
future, and have urged many architects to reconsider the dualisms of inside/outside
and natural/artificial at the center of modern thinking. In response to this
pervading phantasmagoria of green architecture, this paper calls back a seminal
paradigm at the roots of modern architecture: the Crystal Palace designed and
built by the gardener Joseph Paxton in 1851. Different from the historical accounts
which have generally described the building as the outstanding milestone in the
development of dry construction methods and frame structures, this paper will
call attention to Paxton’s overlooked gardening background. In particular, the
paper will examine Paxton’s ambition to imitate nature and to bring it into the
industrial city. In methodological terms, using Michel Foucault’s theory of ‘heterotopia,’
the paper will suggest an alternative reading of the Crystal Palace far form
technological determinism.
Paxton himself admitted that the idea of the Crystal Palace derived from the Lily
House he had constructed in 1850. In the Lily House, the gardener was attracted to
the fictive opacity of glass. For him, the transparent glass envelope was an instrument
to measure and control the physical qualities of interior space. It allowed
him to reinterpret the act of ‘cultivating’ as an artificial gesture which converted
nature into a complete work of art. In other words, the transparent glass enclosure
enabled Paxton to pass over the material aspects of reality in order to achieve a
contact with the natural truth and to manipulate it. But, In his Lily House experiment,
Paxton was not interested in a continuity between inside and outside, or nature
and society. Rather, the main objective of the hothouse was to transcend the
local conditions; it was a ‘natural fiction’ built to relocate and regenerate unknown
species collected from distant places. Read from a Foucauldian standpoint, the
hothouse deserves to be called a heterotopia; it was a gap isolated from its context
to serve both to control and to represent its ‘foreign’ occupants. Unsurprisingly,
the Crystal Palace was similarly built to safely exhibit two strange entities of the
period: industrial objects and distant cultures. Investigating the fictive role Paxton
assigned to transparent glass, this paper does not only intend to reveal the heterotopic
nature of the nineteenth-century hothouse, but also prepares the ground for
the criticism of the contemporary trend associating transparent ‘biospheres’ with
the notion of environment-friendly architecture.