Studio-X Istanbul

Studio-X Istanbul was an urban laboratory on Meclis-i Mebusan Caddesi in Karaköy, open from 2013 to 2019. It belonged to the Studio-X network, an initiative of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, which at its height ran spaces in New York, Amman, Beijing, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo. Each was set up to identify the problems cities face now and will face, and to produce new ways of thinking about them. Istanbul was among the longest-running of them.

The premise was to make the boundary between a global university and the city outside it as vague as possible — to put the university's content out onto the street and take the street's knowledge back in, and to trigger a conversation between the cities in the network while doing it. In practice that meant 450 square metres over two floors, the door open onto the road, the space deliberately left looking half-finished, and an operating principle close to a single word: yes. Anyone who wanted to work on the future of cities was supported, without the programme trying to control what they made. It ran in coordination with Columbia Global Centers | Turkey, and was established in Istanbul with the support of Borusan.

Over 1,825 days, Studio-X Istanbul held 55 exhibitions, 239 workshops, 241 talks and panels, 20 book launches, 7 performances and 30 film screenings, and received close to 65,000 visitors. Those were dense years for Istanbul's urban agenda, and the value of the place was less in any single event than in being a room where academics, civil society, municipalities and practitioners could argue in front of each other.

Studio-X Istanbul was directed by Selva Gürdoğan and Gregers Tang Thomsen, co-founders of Superpool, from the space opening in 2013 until it closed. Mark Wigley's brief when he hired them was almost a single line: say yes, and find a way to support anyone who wants to work on the future of cities. Running the studio alongside the practice meant the two fed each other — a good part of Superpool's later work on childhood, play and public space began as a conversation in Karaköy. The complete record of the 1,825 days, event by event, is collected in the book Studio-X Istanbul.

The original website that was running while the space was open has been reworked, and the archive is available here: link