Alican Taylan (he/him) works at the intersections of architectural and environmental history with an emphasis on colonial and transimperial frameworks in the modern period. His dissertation project examines Sahelian architecture in the nineteenth century through the themes of ecology, political power, and religiosity. His research contextualizes architecture in Sahelian empires within the global Nineteenth-Century and shows the environmental considerations developed during this time through archival and on-site fieldwork. One of the main historiographical challenges he addresses is complicating the relationship between modernity and colonialism in architectural history-writing about Africa.

Alican is a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell's History of Architecture and Urban Development (HAUD), where he has been teaching as a doctoral assistant in the architecture history curriculum. He previously taught at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, in their respective Schools of Architecture, and worked in the offices of architects Peter Eisenman, Shigeru Ban, and Thomas Leeser. His work has been supported by grants from institutions including the Architectural League, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Graham Foundation, the Institute for European Studies and the Einaudi Center at Cornell University, the Cornell Council for the Arts, and Pratt Institute. His writing and curatorial work have been featured in various journals, periodicals, and co-edited volumes including Log, Metropolis Magazine, Mimar.ist, NYRA, Plat, and The Architect's Newspaper.

Alican is also an architect (MArch) and engineer (MEng). He contributed to various exhibitions, including co-curating Confronting Carbon Form (2023), first shown at The Cooper Union, which explored innovative disciplinary approaches to addressing environmental concerns in architecture. He was a co-curator of the exhibition Aesthetics of Prosthetics (2019) at Pratt Institute's School of Architecture. He contributed to the 2018 Turkish pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Recently, he curated Strategic Landforms (2024) at Cornell AAP, an exhibition about military architectural production in French Senegal over the nineteenth century, which questioned the role of colonial infrastructure in modernization processes in West Africa.

Upcoming publications include an article on Kajoor’s anti-colonial struggle through “making the country a desert” against French railway infrastructure in the late nineteenth century in Radical History Review and an essay about the role of architectural observations during George Perkins Marsh’s travels in the Ottoman Empire in his elaboration of environmental theories from the 1850s in International Journal of Islamic Architecture.

Program Area: Architecture and Urbanism; 19th-Century Africa; Global Modern and Contemporary