Alp Demiroglu

Alp Demiroglu is a Master of Environmental Design candidate in the School of Architecture at Yale University.

In general, his research focuses on issues of migration, infrastructure, landscape, and translation throughout the Mediterranean, Caucasus, and Central Asian regions. At Yale, Alp is examining how the South Caucasus serves as a crucial case study for understanding the complex dynamics between territorial sovereignty, resource extraction, and environmental exploitation through an analysis of how infrastructural projects have been wielded as tools of political control while simultaneously transforming the physical and social fabric of the region.

Alp holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University, with a concentration in History of Architecture and minors in European Studies and Migration Studies. His thesis, titled, "Reparative Borderscapes: Sites of Reconciliation between Greece and Turkey,” exposed the violent histories of this border region by exploring reconciliatory and reparative interventions through symbolic, subversive, and substantive erasures of the borders themselves. By investigating the moments the two nations meet, Alp imagined the borderscapes of separation as critical sites of reparation.

A recipient of the Robert J. Eidlitz Travel Fellowship, Alp conducted research on hydro-infrastructural impacts on society and landscapes throughout Central Asia, particularly in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. This research was presented at the Royal Geographical Society's 2024 Annual Conference in London, and exhibited at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Alp has been recognized as a Cornell Tradition Fellow, and has been exhibited in the Turkish Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale. His paper, “Reparative Borderscapes: Dreams After Nightmares,” is published in the Dutch arts and culture magazine Simulacrum, Vol.32 No.1.

Alp refers to himself as a spatial researcher, looking not only at formal and informal “architectures,” but at the relationship of infrastructure and landscape to the societal and cultural systems that govern, determine, and affect perceptions of place.

Department: Architecture