You are kindly invited to a seminar organized by the Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design.
Speaker: Damla Soyer
Title: “From Body-Objects to Micro-Architectures: Rethinking Interior Architecture Beyond Enclosure”
Date: June 16, 2026, Tuesday
Time: 13.30-14.30
Place: FF Building, FB22
Abstract
Architectural discourse has traditionally attributed spatial identity to enclosure, structure,and typology. Yet the environments through which urban life actually proceeds — a shoeshine apparatus on a sidewalk, a desk organized around a craft practice, picnic tables outside a Seoul convenience store — produce identity not through walls but through configurations of objects, bodies, activities, and cultural codes that become operationally sufficient and culturally legible. The structure makes a space possible; the configuration makes it inhabitable. This seminar argues that interior architecture is the discipline whose proper analytical object is this configurational layer, wherever it is found: at the scale of a body attached artifact, a working apparatus, a threshold zone, or an inhabited room. The argument is developed through Configurational Threshold Analysis across cases in Seoul and İstanbul, and extended toward a research program integrating digital fabrication and AI assisted design.
Short Bio
Damla Soyer is a design researcher and interior architect based in Seoul. Her work investigates how objects, bodies, and spatial arrangements produce inhabitable environments across architectural, urban, and cultural contexts. She holds a PhD in Design Studies from Hongik University, where her dissertation examined the cultural experience of design through comparative analysis between Korea and Turkey. Her current research develops the concept of Micro-Architecture as a framework for understanding how spatial identity emerges through non-structural configuration. Her recent work extends this framework toward computational and AI-augmented spatial systems.