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

Ferda Kolatan
Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design and the founding director of su11 

Book Launch

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 of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design and a founding director of SU11 Architecture + Design, based in New York. He earned his Architectural Diploma from RWTH Aachen and his M.S.AAD from Columbia University. Mr. Kolatan has taught at esteemed institutions, including SCI-Arc, Pratt Institute, the University of Virginia, Columbia University, Cornell University, RWTH Aachen, Washington University, and RPI. His work with SU11 has garnered international recognition and has been exhibited at renowned venues such as MoMA, the FRAC Center, Walker Art Center, Vitra Design Museum, Art Basel, Artists Space NY, the Venice Architectural Biennale, the Architecture Biennial Beijing, and the Istanbul Design Biennial. Mr. Kolatan has contributed to numerous journals and books and co-authored the book Meander: Variegating Architecture in 2010. His new book, Misfits & Hybrids: Architectural Artifacts for the 21st-Century City, was published by Routledge in the spring of 2024.

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