Merve Bedir

Merve Bedir, born in Kayseri in 1980, is an architect and researcher. Through design projects, installations, drawings and exhibitions, she studies the infrastructures that shape hospitality and mobility. She co-founded Land and Civilization Compositions, an office for architecture and urban design with bases in Rotterdam and Hong Kong.

A second strand of her research follows the relation between people, machines and landscape as advanced technology enters the built environment. In 2013 she produced Agoraphobia, a documentary about urban change in Turkey. Among her design projects are an industrial kitchen for Gaziantep, designed after the earthquake, and the Postane repair project in Istanbul. She is a co-initiator of Kitchen Workshop in Gaziantep, Aformal Academy in the Pearl River Delta and the Center for Spatial Justice in Istanbul.

She trained at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, graduating in 2003, and earned a PhD at Delft University of Technology in 2017. Her work has appeared at the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Urbanism and Architecture Biennale Shenzhen, the 2017 São Paulo Architecture Biennale and the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. BAK in Utrecht showed Montecarlo in 2023, and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York included Floor Table in Designing Peace. She curated uncommon river in Plovdiv in 2015 and co-curated Automated Landscapes in Shenzhen from 2017 to 2019.