Emre Arolat

Emre Arolat is Founding Partner and Lead Designer at EEA – Emre Arolat Architecture. He has held a professorship at the International Academy of Architecture and is frequently invited to serve on high-profile juries, and to visiting professorships at various prominent universities and academic institutions worldwide such as the Center for Architecture, the Architecture League of New York, Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, RIBA London. He was the Norman R Foster Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture (2017).

Emre Arolat graduated from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul. He joined his parent’s architecture firm, and in 2004, formed his own firm EAA – Emre Arolat Architecture with co-founder Gonca Pasolar. He received international recognition early on in his career, with the Mies Van der Rohe Award for European Architecture for the Minicity Theme Park in Antalya, Türkiye (2004), and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture with the design for the Ipekyol Textile Factory in Edirne, Türkiye (2006). His Sancaklar Mosque was awarded with RIBA International Prize (2018).

He was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (2019), served at the Steering Committee of Aga Khan Award’s Fourteenth Cycle (2017-2019), and was elected as an Honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects AIA (2019).

Emre Arolat has collaborated on many projects with fine arts institutions, a notable example being his collaboration with the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), in which he worked with the organization to co-curate the first Istanbul Design Biennale. He was named co-curator, with Joseph Grima, of the first Istanbul Design Biennial. The exhibition he curated was titled Musibet, which translates as “disaster” or “calamity.” It was held at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, where he displayed a wide array of urban situations and proposals that addressed the insurmountable transformations happening in cities both in Türkiye and worldwide. He also curated EAA’s, arch I strata I antioch exhibition at Time Space Existence Exhibition – a collateral event of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia and the ist-on situations exhibition at RIBA, London. The exhibition explored a timeline beginning with the mid-19th century that shows key events in the urban stories of London and Istanbul.