Coping Mechanisms

Date: December 17, 2025 - Wednesday

Time: 17:00

Place: santralistanbul Campus, Energy Museum, Control Room

Speaker: Michael Chapman

Language: English (No simultaneous translation will be provided.)

Dirty Drawings no.5

Chimeric Practices: Drawing in the Analogue-Digital Threshold

Talk 03

hosted by İstanbul Bilgi University, Faculty of Architecture

Coping Mechanisms 

This lecture investigates a series of projects that explore the emotional rather than functional capacity of the machine in architecture. As a meditation on the modernist idea of the “machine for living in,” this series of projects explores various emotional states of mechanical interaction that both optimize and enhance the human experience. Each project situates a new category of machine, an architecture that encloses it, and a mechanical interaction or collaboration that brings it into the world. Rather than mindlessly performing tasks, these dysfunctional machines are companions, deeply attuned to the pressures, undulations, and vulnerabilities of everyday life. They comprise a series of coping mechanisms, executed through drawing and experienced as an imperfect architecture. 

about Michael Chapman

Michael Chapman is Professor and Chair of Architecture and Design at Western Sydney University, where he teaches architectural design, drawing, and architectural theory. 

Chapman attained his architectural qualifications at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, which developed an international reputation in the 1990s for its commitment to problem-based learning and rigorous architecture. He also has a Research Masters, focusing on the drawings of Lebbeus Woods, and a PhD on the relationship between Dada and Surrealism in architecture. He is currently completing a second PhD at RMIT University in Melbourne, exploring allegory and drawing by documenting the architecture of fictional architects whose drawings whose first name is Michael. He has been engaged in architectural practice since graduating, and has completed a number of bespoke houses and adaptive reuse projects in Newcastle. As well as his built work, he has undertaken an extensive number of exhibitions over the last 20 years, being twice shortlisted for the Australian Institute of Architects’ Unbuilt Architecture award and receiving a commendation in 2021. As well as his exhibition work, he is a co-author of Residue: Architecture as a Condition of Loss (RMIT Press, 2007), which proposes ways for architectural machines to engage with historical events; and a guest co-editor of the Allegorical Architectural Machines (Architectural Design, 2024,  Vol 94, Issue 06).

about Dirty Drawings no.5

Chimeric Practices: Drawing in the Analogue-Digital Threshold

The Dirty Drawings no.5 series is an open, non-profit academic initiative designed and curated by Abdullah Mallah (BİLGİ Alumnus, Architecture 2023 and Architectural Design 2025) and Bilge Bal (BİLGİ Alumni, Architectural Design 2010), with the curiosity of situated drawing practices, an attempt to experience a collaborative ground to co-create, co-experiment, and confabulate about drawing. It consists of international public lectures, workshops, and nomadic exhibitions, and other creative forms to experiment with drawing.   

From griffins to chimeras, myth has long imagined creatures stitched from unlikely parts—beings both wondrous and unsettling, defying categories, inviting us to dream and make otherwise. This series takes that mythic impulse into the realm of drawing, where analogue and digital entwine. In No.5, mediated, smeared, hybrid, and dirty geometries and mechanics invite collective thinking with Perry Kulper and Nat Chard, Sayan Skandarajah, Michael Chapman, Kaden Beilman, Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker, Ephraim Joris, Bea Martin, Adam Marcus and Andrew Kudless, and Carl Lostritto, between November 2025 and March 2026.