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Landed Internationals: Planning Cultures in the Cold War Middle East

October 26, 2016 | Burak Erdim

Commencement ceremony, METU, ca. 1963. Architectural Archives, METU
Commencement ceremony, METU, ca. 1963. Architectural Archives, METU

Burak Erdim is an assistant professor of architectural history and architecture in the College of Design at North Carolina State University, where he teaches lecture and seminar courses on the history of modern architecture and urbanism with a focus on the post–Second World War period. His current work explores the operations of transnational planning cultures and the conceptualization of architecture and community planning as the central component of social and economic development projects during this period. He has recently been awarded a Mellon Fellowship in Urban Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks (Fall 2016) and a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture at MIT (Spring 2017) in support of the work on his book manuscript. His book examines the establishment of the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey in 1956 as one of the most ambitious and comprehensive projects of postwar planning cultures. Dr. Erdim contributes regularly to publications and symposia on Transnational Modernisms and his recent essay on METU appeared in, Mid-Century Modernism in Turkey: Architecture Across Cultures in the 1950s and 1960s, edited by Meltem Ö. Gürel (Routledge, 2015). He received his PhD in December 2012 in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of Virginia where he also completed a master’s degree in Architecture.