2026





NEWS



Anatomy of Inspiration

I was a keynote speaker at the 18th Istanbul Biennale (2025) for the Anatomy of Inspiration talk series!

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Tactical Urbanism Now!
Our project From Soil to Soil: Stitching the Food Cycle through Landscapes and Cultures, with Fernando Sanchez for the Tactical Urbanism Now! competition by TerraViva, won the Community’s Choice Award!

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The Bartlett Autumn Show Book 2025

My master’s dissertation was among the few fully featured in The Bartlett Autumn Show Book 2025 (page 18)!
See the book


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ABOUT
Zeynep Igmen is an architect and researcher specializing in sustainable and socially just architectural and urban practices, based in London and Istanbul. Her work engages with cultural discourses, environmental history, territorial conflicts across land- and waterscapes, and their intersections with material and immaterial cultures. She also explores spatial tectonics and hands-on, low-tech making. In parallel, she contributes to the Latinization of Ottoman Turkish documents and literature.

The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL 2024-2025
MA Architecture and Historic Urban Environments 

          thesis titled “A Practice of Fishing along the Bosphorus: Mapping Dalyans as Sites of Collective Making and Memory”

Uskudar University 2024-2025
MA Sufi Culture and Literature

           final project titled “Tawakkul, Vigour, and Building in the Narrative of Prophet Noah”


Istanbul Bilgi University 2019-2023
BArch Architecture (High Honours)

London College of Music 2007-2022
Classical Piano, Grade 8


Curriculum Vitae


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2026


Location: Bloomsbury, London
Type: Kiosk installation, group
Role: Co-curator and co-coordinator (with Fernando Sanchez)
Date: 2025 Spring

Institution: The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

MA Architecture and Historic Urban Environments (MAHUE) travelled to the modernist UNESCO World Heritage Site of Asmara, Eritrea, in February 2025. The mini-exhibition showcases how we collaborated with local and global partners to achieve outcomes designed to support local work in safeguarding and managing the sustainable development of this modernist World Heritage city.

“For us students, the trip was both immersive and nurturing - combining critical observation with hands-on practice, allowing us to rethink conservation not as a static exercise, but as an active and evolving dialogue with places and people.” 

I curated and organized the fieldtrip kiosk, bringing together visual, textual, and digital materials into a coherent presentation that balanced academic research with accessible storytelling.