Merging Visions
Merve Sahin is an architect and researcher addressing ecological, technological and political challenges of contemporary architecture through speculative storytelling. She works with immersive media environments and parametric architecture.
She creates digital narratives that study the entanglements between human and more-than-human landscapes, addressing the ecological, technological, and architectural form of intelligences in urban spaces. Her practice explores post-digital public spaces through worldbuilding, visualizing media ecologies and material experiments in the form of transmedia installations. Her recent projects reclaim agency through architecture in ecologically, socially and politically compromised environments.
Merve has received multiple prestigious grants, including EU-funded residencies and national awards, highlighting her innovative contributions to architectural research and artistic production. Her work has been presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale and Ars Electronica. Her current project, Merging Visions, is being developed within the framework of the ongoing S+T+Arts Ec(h)o residency. Through visual essays and physical samples, the project engages with evolving urban environments. It offers a new perspective on architectural visualizations, emphasizing the ephemeral and non-material qualities of urban spaces to evoke a sense of kinship in the viewer.
In addition to her research practice, Merve has professional experience as an architectural designer in renowned offices. She holds a master's degree in architecture from Studio Díaz Moreno & García Grinda at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where she also studied under Studio Kazuyo Sejima. Currently, she continues to pursue interdisciplinary collaborations, developing critical, experiential projects at the intersection of architecture, ecology, and digital media.
Merging Visions is an immersive installation that explores the ephemeral qualities of built environments through speculative visual essays. The work expands the vocabulary of architectural visualizations by highlighting the ecological, cultural, and historical layers that shape urban space.
Inspired by thinkers like Donna Haraway and Shannon Mattern,Merging Visions challenges narrow narratives around urban intelligence by engaging with material memory, non-human agents, and multispecies perspectives.
Set in Salzburg,the project investigates the evolution of the Salzburg Festival’s theatre buildings and their relationship with the mountain which they are built into.Through excavation,the theatre spaces have grown within the rock over a century, forming an infrastructure that acts as an inhabited interface between city and mountain.
The visual essay reinterprets digital twins not as static replicas, but as layered spatial narratives that incorporate ecological, and cultural processes.This “dirty,” expanded, and immersive urban twin of Salzburg responds critically to how cities and buildings are often represented through sterile imagery that overlooks the complexity of place and material agency.
The installation expands the visualizations through physical models that are sourced from the mountain in Salzburg through 3D-scanning and printing.These geological samples reflect the mountain’s role as a co-agent in theatre architecture, bearing the marks of excavation and occupation.They act as interactive objects that bring audiences into tactile engagement.Together, the visualizations and models create a narrative that positions this theatre architecture as an evolving and ecological medium.
Merging Visions encourages reflection on how architecture participates in ecological and cultural change.It calls for new ways of visualizing and engaging with urban environments as complex living systems shaped by ecological flows, cultural cycles and material agency.