Zeynep Celik Alexander

Zeynep Çelik Alexander is the third annual Detlef Mertins Lecturer on the Histories of Modernity. She is an associate professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on the history of modern architecture since the Enlightenment. After being trained as an architect at Istanbul Technical University and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, she received her PhD from the History, Theory, and Criticism Program at MIT. She has two forthcoming books: the monograph Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design and the co-edited volume Design Instruments. Alexander’s writings have appeared in several edited volumes as well as in journals, including Log, Harvard Design Magazine, Grey Room, the Journal of Design History, and Centropa. She is a member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative and an editor for the MIT Press journal Grey Room.

“I came to focus on things that had been misunderstood or overlooked in the historical record and could, therefore, serve as mediators for new thought and design. The writing of architectural history can close down the past or open it up anew. It can bind historical experience into yet another ism… or it can unlock the life and modernité that resides even in the modernisms we already have.”
– Detlef Mertins

Organized by Columbia GSAPP.