At the third event of the ODE Select Architects' Meetings, we spoke with Büşra Al, founding partner of Plug Ofis, and Aydan Volkan, partner at Kreatif Mimarlık, on the theme "Architecture and the Idea of the New".
I, Aydan Volkan and Büşra Al graduated ten years apart from the Department of Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of Yıldız Technical University. In this conversation we talked about the face of architecture in Türkiye, which has changed its shell over the last thirty years, and about what it is to be a woman architect in Türkiye.
While Aydan Volkan shared the successful course of the career she has pursued within Kreatif Mimarlık, Büşra Al, who has drawn notice with the awards she has won in competitions, told of the new ways of working that young architects are finding in a changing milieu, and told her own story.
The conversation I had with Büşra, who spoke of young architects forming a kind of collective and producing projects together in different contexts, and with Aydan, a representative of the corporate office tradition, was deeply eye-opening.
Aydan had been thinking for quite a while about the idea of the "new", which was also the theme of the talk, and she had been guest editor of issue 57 of Betonart magazine, on the theme of the "new". The idea of the "new normal", which in those days had not yet become part of our lives, naturally became part of the discussion too.