Ekin Bilal

Ekin Bilal is an architectural designer, educator, and co-founder of NOT NOT, an architectural practice exploring the overlooked dimensions of architecture, including maintenance routines, material afterlives, and regulatory ambiguities, as sites for design and political inquiry. NOT NOT works across buildings, installations, comics and exhibitions, with ongoing projects including residential work in New York and Washington and exhibition and installation design for cultural institutions. Bilal is also the principal investigator of the Office of Back of House, an ongoing research practice concerned with projects in, around, and about the backsides of architecture.

His work and collaborations have been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Van Alen Institute, Pratt Institute, the Fashion Institute of Technology, Storefront for Art and Architecture and the Timișoara Architecture Biennial, and are represented in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a forthcoming MacDowell Fellow and has received support and recognition from the Architectural League of New York, New York State Council of Arts, Van Alen Institute, Cornell University, and MIT.

At MIT, Bilal teaches architectural design and coordinates the M.Arch thesis program. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP and previously taught as a Visiting Critic at Cornell University. He holds a SMArchS from MIT and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University.