Misfits & Hybrids: Architectural Artifacts for the 21st-Century City

Contemporary cities are shaped by the unlikely adjacencies of objects that are vastly different in kind, origin, and scale: buildings, infrastructure, and other urban components that over time accumulate into mismatched configurations. However, despite the ubiquity of these oddities and their impact on the city, we rarely give them much consideration. In Misfits & Hybrids, Ferda Kolatan explores the untapped potential in these unexpected conditions for a new kind of architecture. A diverse array of projects, developed in Kolatan's design studios at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, illustrates how hybrid artifacts can reveal the often overlooked cultural, socio-political, and material histories of a site, fostering design tactics invested in reinventing the existing. Set within the cosmopolitan megacities of Istanbul, Cairo, and New York, the projects are conceived as real fictions, conjuring novel narrative, aesthetic, and representational forms to reflect the pluralistic postindustrial city.

Ferda Kolatan is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design and a founding director of SU11 Architecture + Design. Mr. Kolatan's design work with SU11 has been exhibited at renowned venues including the FRAC Center, Walker Art Center, Vitra Design Museum, PS1, MoMA, Art Basel, and the Venice, Istanbul, and Beijing Biennales. As an academic, he has taught at SCI-Arc, Pratt Institute, University of Virginia, University of Innsbruck, and Columbia University among others. Mr. Kolatan has contributed to numerous architectural publications and coauthored the book Meander: Variegating Architecture. He was selected as a "Young Society Leader" by the American-Turkish Society in New York and his Cairo research studio was awarded the inaugural 2017 ARCHITECT Magazine Studio Prize.

1. Misfits & Hybrids: Architectural Artifacts for the 21st Century 2. Istanbul: Unscripted Immediacies of Past, Present, and Future 3. Cairo: Real Fictions 4. New York: Authenticity without Origin