Hande's bio
Hande is an Architect and Landscape Architect with over nine years of experience in Turkey and International projects. She is experienced in landscape and public realm design in various typologies and geographies. Before joining Gillespies, she worked on a wide variety of mixed-use retail, residential, and recreational schemes, campus and public spaces, urban-rural transitions, urban stormwater management, and blue-green infrastructure. She has won national and international awards from various design competitions. She is also educated in Permaculture Design and has developed a sensitivity to how we can desing and implement practices to improve and support the environment in terms of ecology, energy, and economy. She engages in projects at all scales, through practice and theory, that respond to environmental resources, changing climate, social impact, and equity. She seeks to use innovative graphical techniques to create and characterize unique landscapes.
During her graduate education, she wrote an article titled “Reading the Urban Articulation of Istanbul Through Secondary Buildings” with her team. She was also part of the design studio juries as a guest lecturer and participated in seminars as a speaker. Hande graduated in 2021 with a Master’s Degree in Architecture from Istanbul Technical University, where she wrote her master’s thesis, “A feminist perspective of architectural practice.”