Selva Gürdoğan

Selva Gürdoğan graduated with the Medal of Excellence from the Southern California Institute of Architecture in 2003. She began her career at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, working in both the Rotterdam and New York offices. In 2006, she co-founded Superpool, an architecture and urban design practice in Istanbul and Copenhagen, with Gregers Tang Thomsen.

From 2013 to 2019, Selva co-directed Studio-X Istanbul, an urban laboratory of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Between 2019 and 2022, she taught a Diploma Unit at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.

Since 2017, she has led and advised on numerous public initiatives for children and caregivers within the Urban95 framework of the Van Leer Foundation, collaborating with city administrations in Türkiye, Jordan, Ethiopia, and Zambia.

Selva currently lives between Copenhagen and Istanbul. Across geographies, her work focuses on redesigning everyday urban environments to make cities more supportive and joyful for the people who use them. She was recently awarded the national Anadolu Ödülleri - Architecture Award by the Baksı Kültür Sanat Vakfı, recognising her work in advancing architecture as a field of social impact through publicness, research, and collaboration, as well as her commitment to open-source production and partnerships.