Assistant Professor
Firat Erdim
Assistant Professor, Architecture
Mailing Address
Architecture Department
158 College of Design
Ames, IA, 50011
Contact Information
Phone: (515) 294-8256
Email: firat@iastate.edu
Office: 0584 Design
Education
M. Arch. University of Virginia
B. Arch. The Cooper Union
On the Web
Research Interests
Whether with chisel, cast shadow, sprayed ink, or the towline of a kite, my practice investigates the intersection of projection, place, and materiality to question axioms of architectural imagination. I read the “expanded field” between architecture, sculpture, and landscape as situating proto-architectural aesthetic practices in an implicitly cyclical cosmology of disassembly and assembly, and of the nomadic and the situated. The focus of my creative practice has gradually shifted from the disassembly side of the expanded field, working with saws and chisels to quarry sites and materials, toward the social and material assembly side, to create collectives and instruments of measurement, joinery, and attunement. Different sets of projects have involved research into different strains of knowledge and ways of making, including crochet, stone carving, printmaking, land surveying, aeronautics, sound technology & the design of musical instruments. Whether it is the line of a saw cut or of a walk, a sightline, towline, or the vibrating line of a musical string, whether it is taking something apart or stitching things together, a fundamental question is: “what does a line know and how does it know it?” This practice through drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance-based projects has explored the indeterminate zone of ruins, episodic spaces, and sites of suspended construction – in other words, states of becoming - seeking to bridge between the individual act of imagining and the collective act of constructing architecture.
Current Projects
Peregrine Projections
Kite Choir
Walking Harps
Atmospheric Listening Stations