Mellow's Catio is a small timber-and-mesh extension designed and built for an indoor cat encountering a new environment after moving from Istanbul to Cyprus. Conceived as a thickened threshold between his room and the outdoors, the enclosure creates a protected space for experiencing air, light, sounds, and views without leaving the house. A timber frame supports soft mesh enclosure, while integrated sills provide elevated surfaces for perching, observing, and resting. The project became an intimate experiment in tectonics, soft enclosure, and designing for non-human inhabitation.
Dikmen, Cyprus | 2025
MELLOW'S CATIO
Pix proposes a public installation composed of dry-assembled concrete blocks that appear from a distance as a pixelated mass within the urban landscape. The hollow blocks incorporate crushed waste brick and roof tile and are connected by threaded steel rods, allowing the assembly to be dismantled and reconfigured. As visitors approach, the abstract mass reveals its individual components, connections, and traces of construction. Steps, seating, planters, and water basins emerge from the changing aggregation, making material, assembly, and transformation the architecture itself.
Credits: Bahar Aktuna, Pınar Çalışır Adem
Istanbul, Turkey | Yapı Tasarım Yarışması 2023 Competition Entry
PIX
BURROW
Woodbine Beach, Toronto | Winter Stations 2021 Competition Entry
Burrow proposes a subterranean refuge embedded in the sand of Woodbine Beach beneath a reflective metallic roof. Three levels of inhabitation move from the everyday ground, to a darker excavated space for retreat, and upward toward the horizon and sky. Sand forms the inhabitable ground, while steel rods and polished aluminium panels create a lightweight, removable superstructure. Concealing and revealing itself from different viewpoints, the proposal shifts between shelter, excavation, and horizon.
Credits: Erum Ahmed, Bahar Aktuna, Charlie Hailey
RELIQUARY
Winnipeg, Canada | Warming Huts 2021 Competition Entry
Reliquary proposes a winter shelter along the Assiniboine and Red Rivers as both refuge and vessel for the artifacts and memories of winter. A translucent outer skin wraps a timber lattice of niches that gradually collect objects left by visitors. By day, the membrane reflects the shimmering winter landscape; by night, it becomes animated by shadows from within. Open toward the river and skating trail, the structure operates simultaneously as shelter, porch, stage, and collective repository.
Credits: Erum Ahmed, Bahar Aktuna, Charlie Hailey
POCHÉ
Dobrava, Slovenia | Rammed Earth House Competition 2021(hosted by Outsider Magazine) Competition Entry
Poché reinterprets the water well as an archetype of the agrarian landscape and transforms its thick, stereotomic enclosure into a place of dwelling. A monolithic rammed-earth mass mediates between a circular exterior and rectilinear interior, creating an inhabitable poché that contains domestic spaces, niches, windows, and services. At its center, a vertical atrium connects earth and sky, bringing daylight and the movement of surrounding foliage into the shelter. The project explores stereotomy, material thickness, and dwelling within the wall.
Credits: Erum Ahmed, Bahar Aktuna, Bin Sayeed Bakhti, Charlie Hailey
MUSEUM OF CATASTROPHE
Flachau, Austria | Minus20degrees 2021 Vompetition Entry
Museum of Catastrophe is an ephemeral architectural installation emerging from the snowscape of Flachau. Conceived as a tectonic exploration in ice, the museum suspends environmental pollutants within frozen blocks, temporarily transforming waste into archaeological artefacts of the present. As seasonal temperatures rise, the ice melts and the architecture gradually disappears, releasing the objects from display. Through this cycle of preservation, exposure, and disappearance, the project explores ice as both building material and a temporary archive of human impact on the environment.
Credits: Erum Ahmed, Bahar Aktuna, Bin Sayeed Bakhti, Charlie Hailey
De-urbanised Epidemics: Planetary Coopetition for Re-Design of the Concept of Health in Relation to the Built Environment 2020 Entry
Ecopoetic Polis imagines a city in which buildings follow an organic life cycle: they emerge, age, decay, and gradually return space to other forms of life. Rather than maintaining permanent human control over the urban landscape, the city cyclically withdraws from selected areas, allowing existing structures to become ruins, multispecies habitats, and grounds for urban cultivation. An elevated circulation network maintains human movement while the ground is progressively released to ecological regeneration, creating a shifting relationship between city, ruin, wilderness, and inhabitation.
Credits: Bahar Aktuna, Erum Ahmed
ECOPOETIC POLIS
