Sude Uçan

Sude Uçan, a graduate of Middle East Technical University's Department of Architecture, is currently pursuing her Master of Science degree and serving as a research assistant in the Department of Architecture at Bilkent University. She conceives architectural practice not merely as a physical realm of production, but as a dynamic stage where social, cultural, and ideological structures are constructed and experienced. By integrating her active background in theater, along with her sensitivity to staging, body, rhythm, and spatial perception, into architectural theory, she posits that urban space is never a neutral backdrop. Centering her research on her thesis topic, Architecture of the State: Performing Ideology Through Urban Space, she investigates how written and spatial scripts manipulate individual behavior to induce specific performances, while conversely examining how human actions can subvert and reshape this architectural script. Within this theoretical intersection, her work draws upon Henri Lefebvre's production of space, Michel Foucault's disciplinary power and surveillance mechanisms, Hannah Arendt's public realm, and Yona Friedman's flexible urban concepts. Her research focuses on the dynamic friction between the top-down spatial protocols dictated by state architecture and the community's agency to rewrite this choreography to reclaim the urban commons.