Stanford Humanities Center
A History of the World by Modern Architecture will revise the existing narratives of modern architecture by giving due acknowledgment to not only its liberties and inventions, but also its political and ecological harms. The worldwide momentum to reckon with the wounds of the past including those of colonialism, environmental extraction, racial capitalism, fascism, and apartheid encourages rewriting global histories. Despite the burgeoning of focused scholarship that exposed modernism’s dark faces and provided knowledge on hitherto excluded lands, there is a big gap in synthesizing these historical studies and bringing them to the attention of non-expert and multidisciplinary audiences. The book I am writing will provide a different comprehensive history of modern architecture by replicating neither the conventional celebratory survey with a linear western narrative, nor the area studies approach that divides the world into self-contained and separate geographical entities. It will carry international debates on repair, reparations and climate change mitigation to architectural history by substantiating the argument that seemingly singular and isolated world crises have deep roots in intertwined planetary history. It will also transform the existing history of global modernity by writing people’s history of architecture through oral histories and urban anthropology studies that shed light on community histories of the spaces we inhabit.
SHC Project
A History of the World by Modern Architecture
Esra Akcan’s research on modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism foregrounds the intertwined histories of Europe, West Asia and Northeast Africa, and offers new ways to understand architecture’s role in global, social, and environmental justice. She has written extensively, lectured globally, and received multiple fellowships on critical and postcolonial theory, immigration, climate change, racism, reparations and transitional justice, architectural photography, translation, neoliberalism, and global history.
Architecture and the Right-to-Heal: Resettler Nationalism in the Aftermath of Conflict and Disaster (Durham: Duke University Press, 2025)
Abolish Human Bans: Intertwined Histories of Architecture (Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture, January 2022)
Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA-1984/87 , (Basel: Birkhäuser- de Gruyter University Press, 2018).
Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
Turkey: Modern Architectures in History, co-author: Sibel Bozdoğan, (London: Reaktion / University of Chicago Press, 2012).
