Ercument Gorgul
Dr. Ercument Gorgul is a multiple award-winning professor, designer, and technologist whose career spans academia, design innovation, and human-centered technologies. A pioneer in parametric design education in China since 2008, Ercu has held positions at prominent institutions, including Hong Kong University, Tsinghua University, and more recently, Tongji University. At Tongji, he was the first non-Chinese, full-time foreign faculty member at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP), where he played a key role in fostering a more diverse and inclusive student body across Tongji’s faculties and international institutions while advancing educational quality through innovative teaching methods.
During his studies at Harvard University and as a cross-registered student at MIT (Courses 4 & MAS), Ercu contributed as a research associate and teaching assistant at the Harvard Center for Design Informatics under Professor (Emeritus) Spiro Pollalis. He was part of a team awarded Harvard’s Provost’s Grant for Innovation for one of the pioneering web-based distance education projects in Learning and Instructional Technology.
Ercument’s academic contributions also include directing internationally recognized programs, such as the 2009 Summer Program in Architecture at the University of Hong Kong, advanced summer workshops at Shih-Chien University, and the Shanghai Global Summer School with the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IaaC) from 2014 to 2022. His teaching roles have included positions at Tsinghua University in Beijing under Professor Xu Weiguo, HKU’s Shanghai Centre under the late Professor Ralph Lerner, the Architectural Association’s (AA) Global Schools in China, and the University of Applied Sciences in Stuttgart (HFT). His collaborative work has been widely exhibited, including at the Hong Kong–Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale and the Venice Biennale.
Ercument’s courses emphasize experimental teaching methods, parametrics, generative and computational design, manual and digital fabrication and alternative representation techniques, fostering a transdisciplinary approach from design fundamentals to complex, multi-scalar spatial experiences. His research focuses on space conceptualization, experiential design, creativity in design education, human-environment interaction and future built environment experience, fostering cross-disciplinary talent through unique methods of abstraction.
Outside academia, Ercument leads EGG, a consulting firm specializing in research, technology, and experiential design at the intersection of space, materiality, and engineering. EGG’s projects span digital fabrication, spatial design, education, furniture, identity, and interactive solutions.
Ercument holds a High Honors Bachelor’s degree from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, a Master’s degree from Harvard University, two Master’s degrees from Istanbul Technical University, and a PhD in neuroscience and the built environment. He is an Associate AIA and a LEED Accredited Professional.
In his free time, Ercument volunteers on platforms promoting neuroscience and its education, including the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), where he currently co-chairs the Doctorate Platform, and more recently with Neuromatch Academy and MEXA, participating to advance transdisciplinary research and education in neuroscience.
During his studies at Harvard University and as a cross-registered student at MIT (Courses 4 & MAS), Ercu contributed as a research associate and teaching assistant at the Harvard Center for Design Informatics under Professor (Emeritus) Spiro Pollalis. He was part of a team awarded Harvard’s Provost’s Grant for Innovation for one of the pioneering web-based distance education projects in Learning and Instructional Technology.
Ercument’s academic contributions also include directing internationally recognized programs, such as the 2009 Summer Program in Architecture at the University of Hong Kong, advanced summer workshops at Shih-Chien University, and the Shanghai Global Summer School with the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IaaC) from 2014 to 2022. His teaching roles have included positions at Tsinghua University in Beijing under Professor Xu Weiguo, HKU’s Shanghai Centre under the late Professor Ralph Lerner, the Architectural Association’s (AA) Global Schools in China, and the University of Applied Sciences in Stuttgart (HFT). His collaborative work has been widely exhibited, including at the Hong Kong–Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale and the Venice Biennale.
Ercument’s courses emphasize experimental teaching methods, parametrics, generative and computational design, manual and digital fabrication and alternative representation techniques, fostering a transdisciplinary approach from design fundamentals to complex, multi-scalar spatial experiences. His research focuses on space conceptualization, experiential design, creativity in design education, human-environment interaction and future built environment experience, fostering cross-disciplinary talent through unique methods of abstraction.
Outside academia, Ercument leads EGG, a consulting firm specializing in research, technology, and experiential design at the intersection of space, materiality, and engineering. EGG’s projects span digital fabrication, spatial design, education, furniture, identity, and interactive solutions.
Ercument holds a High Honors Bachelor’s degree from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, a Master’s degree from Harvard University, two Master’s degrees from Istanbul Technical University, and a PhD in neuroscience and the built environment. He is an Associate AIA and a LEED Accredited Professional.
In his free time, Ercument volunteers on platforms promoting neuroscience and its education, including the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), where he currently co-chairs the Doctorate Platform, and more recently with Neuromatch Academy and MEXA, participating to advance transdisciplinary research and education in neuroscience.
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Workshops by Ercument Gorgul
Courses by Ercument Gorgul
The University of Hong Kong is aimed towards Form 5 – 7
level students, who are considering architecture as a future
career. The challenge is to teach design and creativity to a
secondary education level audience with minimum to none
previous experience and encourage them to choose this path
as well as the particular institution for their further education.
It is believed that the more crucial problem is to develop a
content that serves as an awakening for students and an
alternative to what is known as “spoon-feeding education”,
that is dominating China.
To be applied over the course of three weeks, an entirely
new content is developed that has origins on six basic
perception levels of space and how these levels can be
investigated progressively. This idea further developed into
refinement of a versatile, three-pillar system through
extraction of workshop and lecture topics based on studio. By
adding content on history, landscape architecture, cinema,
performing arts, fashion, etc., the program intentionally
enabled students to position themselves and architecture in a
broader context and also create an opportunity for multidisciplinary
collaboration within faculty as well as Hong Kong creative community.
Aside from promoting the inter-disciplinary relations, a
methodology of non-didactical teaching and knowledge
sharing is also applied, to encourage students to establish
their very own vision of architecture. This has further
enhanced with additional in-studio methods, enabling
students to learn through experiment.
These strategies created a highly motivated, self-paced but
intensive design studio environment as a result. Based on
total number of participants, exit interviews and evaluations,
the attendance increased around 20% and the overall
effectiveness/satisfaction rating of program nears to 95%.
Given the central government’s recent emphasis in the 13th 5-year plan on encouraging creative and innovative industries, it is relevant to generate programs on cultural development focusing on younger generations. Through this, municipal governments can improve the quality of life and empower the young generation to shape the long-term prosperity of their cities.
What are various ways to develop solutions based on strengthening community relations? What are the dynamics of relationship of people with each other from different social milieu? Potential discussion areas include deployment of policies such as providing grants for artists and innovators, creating tax incentives that encourage corporate social responsibility programs, and restructuring public processes to ease among different social milieu of same generation as well among different generations.
It seems that China's urban development states a condition of “survivability” rather than “livability”. What is understood from the notion of livability within a city today is to be able to sustain quality of life through holistic planning strategies rather than purely economic ones. Such cities create robust natural environments as well as built environments, social equity as well as social stability. And as a result both a more reliable creative prosperity and economic prosperity have been maintained.
This paper will seek to establish a 3-pillar approach to social inclusion and will examine each of these through issues related with migrants in China facing today. It seems that there is a great potential in using mobile and web-based technologies to generate rapid and sustainable solutions for migrants. There is also an enormous potential to develop feedback mechanisms for these solutions that can become part of the ‘culture’ of living in big cities in China.
on cognitive and neurophysiological responses. However many of these experiments are either limited to lab environments, providing representations
of built environment or are experiments designed around mobility, availability
or usability limitations of sensors. Part of our lab’s ongoing research attempts to address these issues, providing a wearable low-cost Arduino-based sensor kit with
customized code, which we developed in-house. The kit simultaneously measures heart rate (HR) and electrodermal activity (EDA) alongside ambient parameters of environment such as sound, temperature, humidity, light as well as GPS location, as an alternative to high-end, expensive systems.
Urban thresholds also help us explore how architecture interacts with the city through the creation of intermediate spaces of different nature, and how people interact with the urban spaces when moving across through these transitional areas. By analyzing these elements, we can analyze this overlooked realm, what role they are playing in the city and in urban planning discipline, via how the inhabitants of the city interact with them, and how they can act as enablers or facilitators in urban spaces.
Being a local edition of a globally run summer workshop series conceived by Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IaaC)’s Global Summer School, the workshop in Shanghai has an agenda in line with the global workshops’ brief, dealing with the immediate problems of cities using digital design methodologies, customized electronics and digital fabrication techniques, with a particular focus on urbanization issues of Shanghai. Thus, departing from these facts, within this paper we will review the results of selected prototype projects dealing with boundaries and how urban thresholds can have a more digital and speculative role in future urban spaces.
Within this frame, selected prototypes as the outputs of the workshop, suggest a more speculative and interactive urban environment. As our lives converge to a more connected and digitized experiences, these projects might as well illustrate a potential of a more integrated use of information based infrastructures as well as innovative projections how to bridge the gap of real and virtual.
ISSN: 1300-3801
This 8-page comprehensive interview introduces Balmond's work in his own words with engaging questions. This publication predates A+U's November 2006 special issue.
ISSN: 1300-3801