AA student Ezgi Terzioglu was one of three students to be awarded 2020 Kohn Pedersen Fox Travelling Fellowships, based on work produced whilst studying with ‘Perpetuum Mobile’ (Diploma 21). In light of recent events, the theme of the competition this year was ‘Journeys of the Mind’, and Terzioglu was competing for the fellowship against nominees from 27 design schools around the world, judged by a jury including Kenneth Frampton, Steven Holl, Eva Franch, Eric Howeler, James Von Klemperer and Marianne Kwok. The prize includes a grant to pursue a research project through travel, enabling students to creatively engage with architecture that might otherwise have been inaccessible.

Terzioglu commented that: ‘My proposal was to extend my research questions from my 4th year project onto a summer project where I continued exploring forms of individual and common occupation in settings of ‘sculpted architecture’ – in the words of Spiro Kostof, through 3D modelling based on written records and architectural sketches. The study focuses on the primeval practice of carving out environments from rocks, specifically in the Byzantine settlements of Cappadocia, Turkey.

Having lacked an urban tradition beforehand and suffered from the social injustice of the local Roman rule, Cappadocia quickly adopted Christianity and became an early centre of Eastern monasticism. This new way of living took shape in what Bernard Rudofsky calls ‘architecture by substraction’ – hundreds of monasteries and churches alongside secular dwellings carved out from soft rocks. The study looks at the spatial qualities of the individually and commonly occupied spaces – the hermitage and the monastery – bounded with one continuous building material, the landscape.’