What was observed
People returning to Habib-i Neccar Mosque and St. Paul Greek Orthodox Church—praying, gathering, tending thresholds—before any structure was restored.
Can we look otherwise?
Başka türlü bakabilir miyiz?
iz is a relational research and spatial practice. Heritage is its first laboratory.
Before we ask how to preserve a place, we ask how to know it.
Decisions about places are often made from records that capture buildings, objects, and official values—but leave out much of the life people are still carrying.
A place is not, first of all, a collection of things. It is a field of relationships.
iz begins with the trace, but reveals the relationship. The trace is the unit of observation; the relation is the unit of meaning.
Mapping, documenting, and interpreting the relations already present in a place—through the Four-Quadrant Framework and long-term fieldwork.
active · AntakyaBuilding spatial situations in which relations can be felt, voiced, remembered, or allowed to emerge.
emergingThe same inquiry at the scale of a damaged city, or of a single person in a room.
People returning to Habib-i Neccar Mosque and St. Paul Greek Orthodox Church—praying, gathering, tending thresholds—before any structure was restored.
Worship and belonging continuing through the community's presence, not the building's survival.
Official assessments logged structural damage; they did not register the living practice still holding the place.
Reading heritage as rupture unfolds elsewhere—provisional, sourced, question-led. iz(trace) in real time.
Enter →Spatial and participatory work where a relation can be felt or voiced. The first encounter project is in development.
What if a place is not what survives—but what is still being carried?
Heritage is not only what remains. It is what we keep practicing—the memory, the care, the daily gestures that hold a place together long after the record closes. A trace is easy to miss. Learning to read it changes what a place is allowed to keep.
Architect and architectural historian; founder of iz(trace). A long-term relationship to Antakya; post-earthquake fieldwork; the development of the Four-Quadrant Framework; an emerging artistic and spatial practice. iz carries the method without concealing the person who formed it—its authority is a convergence of lived connection, training, research, field observation, and sensitivity. PhD, History, Theory & Criticism of Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology. Based in Chicago; rooted in Turkey.
Short observations, photographs, fragments from site visits, early encounter experiments—thinking in the first person, before it becomes a formal project.
Notes from Antakya, the notebook, and the room. This is where you follow Çiçek, not only iz.
A living section—updated as the work moves.
iz works with people and institutions facing rupture, transition, disappearance, or questions of belonging—for research collaborations, exhibitions, workshops, institutional studies, and spatial encounters.