Izmir Architecture Week 2026: KUR-mak

The Izmir Branch of the Chamber of Architects of Turkey (TMMOB Mimarlar Odası İzmir Şubesi) holds Izmir Architecture Week 2026 from 5 to 9 October at the Izmir Architecture Center. This year’s theme is “KUR-mak”, a play on the Turkish verb for building, setting up and assembling, framed around one question: how is an idea built?

The curatorial text treats building as far more than construction. A structure is set up, but so are a mechanism, a stage, an exhibition, a camera frame, a sentence or a dinner table. Drawing on Donald Schön’s idea of design as a reflective conversation with the situation, the programme looks at the steps between a thought and a material object, and at how light, sound, texture and movement shape the way a space is experienced before it is described.

Rather than working only through talks, the week sets out to research the theme by making. For five days the Izmir Architecture Center becomes a working space where things are assembled, taken apart, presented, tested, changed and put together again, bringing architecture into contact with other fields of design and art.