Building a Legacy

Fall 2025
By Alice Levitt

Are architects born or taught? According to Kerim Miskavi ’14, architecture is in his DNA. As a child, some of his earliest memories involve spending time with his grandfather, an architect in Miskavi’s hometown of Mersin in southern Turkey, eagerly learning the family trade. 

“He used to have this really amazing drawing table with pens and a sketch pad and the T-ruler and everything,” Miskavi recalls. As a 6-year-old, Miskavi was so fascinated by the subject that his grandfather taught him to sketch — first two-point perspectives, then three-dimensional shapes. “And I just kept going from there,” he says.

Now based in Istanbul, Miskavi is founding partner and design lead of MAS Architecture Studio, which specializes in local and international projects across the globe. “In terms of visual style, I don’t really adhere to any kind of specific aesthetic,” Miskavi says. “Whenever I start a new project, I have no idea what the outcome is going to be, but I have a process that I follow that leads us to pretty exciting outcomes.”

In 2022, just four years after the firm’s founding, MAS won a national competition to design a new campus of the Izmir University of Economics, located on the Aegean coast about three hours from Istanbul. The firm is responsible for “the whole shebang,” ranging from dorms to the library to the sports complex. The award committee noted the firm’s emphasis on sustainability as well as their forward-thinking architectural approach. The buildings use natural light to brighten everything from skylit hallways to boxy blue-and-white lab spaces lined with windows. Sunny outdoor walkways are surrounded by greenery to bring nature into the urban environment.
 

Miskavi’s own education included attending an American high school in Istanbul. It was an easy decision, he says, to head to Rice to pursue his Bachelor of Architecture: In addition to the opportunity to join a small group of similarly focused architecture students, Miskavi was drawn to the city of Houston itself. “I was pretty much fully immersed in the lifestyle and the culture of Houston,” he recalls. 

Today, Miskavi stays connected to the Rice community by hosting architecture students at MAS for internships. “It’s really nice to have someone who is going through the same education because you develop such a common language and common culture in what you do,” he says. 

Miskavi’s laurels continue to roll in. This year, he was invited to take part in the Biennale d’Architecture et de Paysage d’Île de France, where participants addressed the convergence of architecture and climate change. 

“Architecture is considered to be a very slow profession, and anyone under the age of 40 is a young architect,” he says. As a decidedly young architect with a growing international reputation, both Miskavi and MAS are just getting started.