Nilüfer Karanfil is an architect, researcher, and artist whose practice examines the layered narratives of the built environment through spatial research, visual representation, and critical inquiry. Working across architecture, photography, archives, mapping, and writing, she investigates the social, material, and ecological conditions that shape places and their transformation over time.
Research-based architectural and artistic practice investigating the layered narratives of the built environment through critical spatial inquiry and modes of representation. Working across architecture, photography, mapping, archives, publishing, and moving image, the practice explores the spatial, social, and material conditions that shape places, revealing the relationships between memory, transformation, and the production of space.
Biography
Nilüfer Karanfil Büyükyıldırım is an architect, researcher, and artist based in Istanbul. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture and a PhD from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, and an MA in History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture from Istanbul Bilgi University.
Her work operates at the intersection of architecture, artistic practice, and research, investigating the built environment as a field of layered spatial, material, and social narratives. Through long-term, site-based research, she explores questions of transformation, memory, modern and industrial heritage, housing, urban landscapes, and ecological thinking. Photography, moving image, mapping, archives, and publishing function not as independent disciplines but as complementary modes of spatial inquiry and representation.
Alongside her independent research and artistic practice, she has worked as an architect, designer, art director, researcher, and project coordinator on interdisciplinary projects across architecture, design, and the arts. Her projects have been exhibited internationally, including Écume – Échanges Culturels en Méditerranée, EASA SESAM, Belarus Architects Assembly, TAB Gallery, and Studio-X Istanbul (GSAPP Columbia University).
She is the author of several self-published photobooks, including Güneye Gideceğiz Beraber, Elimde, Yeldeğirmeni, Unknown Lighting Cache I and Unknown Lighting Cache II, and has participated in collaborative publishing and research initiatives such as the Istanbul Photobook Festival, FUAM, and the Istanbul Design Biennial. In 2019, she received the MAD Research Fund to develop Lodgements, a research and documentary project investigating the history and spatial narratives of public housing in Turkey.
Her recent research focuses on adaptive reuse, industrial and modern architectural heritage, spatial justice, circularity, and the evolving relationships between architecture, ecology, and urban memory.