27th Barış Eyikan Kılınç Graduation Project Award

The Barış Eyikan Kılınç Graduation Project Award is the department's long-standing annual prize, given each year to graduating students whose final projects are selected by a jury. It is endowed by the family of Barış Eyikan Kılınç, a cherished former member of the Bilkent LAUD community, in her memory, and has become a meaningful tradition that closes each cohort's four years of study.

The 2026 jury convened online on 3 June 2026 to evaluate eleven projects submitted from the LAUD 402 final studio, developed on the city of Belgrade. Before scoring, the jury agreed on a shared set of expectations, distilled into five criteria:

• Potential value of the design idea — the courage and promise it carries, even where it remains unbuilt.
• Cross-scale continuity and consistency — a design concept that holds together from the conceptual approach down to the interventions.
• Originality of the spatial interventions that make the design work.
• Originality and suitability of the site selection and the problem it defines.
• Graphic communication — a coherent, developed visual language across plans, sections, three-dimensional views and diagrams.

First place — Ece Beyza Özdemir. Recognized for sustaining its idea across every scale, turning monotonous urban superblocks into a rich, heterogeneous fabric, weaving water into the design, and setting out a phased, roughly thirty-year path to realization.

Second place — Öznur Işık. Built a strong premise from flooding and water disaster, with an assured visual language and a transparent, well-declared use of generative-AI tools in its production.

Third place — Ece Dağalp. Praised for a consistent, landscape-driven approach to place-making that carried its concept confidently into the 1/200 scale.