Orhan Ayyüce, Architect and Archinect Voice, Dies at 75

Orhan Ayyüce, an architect, educator, writer and longtime Archinect contributor who became a distinctive voice in Los Angeles architecture, died at his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on September 20. He was 75.

Ayyüce and his wife, Tina Simon, moved to Albuquerque in June, shortly after he retired from East Los Angeles College. The couple bought a condominium in a building designed by Antoine Predock. He planned to spend his retirement writing — possibly a book — and told friends he wanted to write about Los Angeles from outside the city, with enough distance to see it more clearly.

Mimi Zeiger, writing on social media, called Ayyüce "a brilliant defender of the urban realm" and a "champion of critical voices."

Born in İzmir, Turkey, Ayyüce came to the United States in the 1970s, initially planning to stay three months while visiting his sister in Sacramento. He stayed and eventually made his way to Los Angeles.

A community college instructor and Frank Lloyd Wright disciple, Walter Harvey, first encouraged Ayyüce to study architecture. Soon after, Ayyüce attended an AIA convention, where he met architectural historian Esther McCoy. She directed him to the newly established SCI-Arc and told him to seek out its founding director, Ray Kappe.

Ayyüce enrolled at SCI-Arc in 1978. He later recalled living under his desk at the school for two years — an experience emblematic of the experimental culture that shaped his understanding of architecture. He graduated in 1981 and remained connected to SCI-Arc and its community for the rest of his life.

Los Angeles became his adopted home. He was drawn to the city's density, mobility, immigrant communities, industrial landscapes and contradictions. His writing covered its warehousing and infrastructure, its pollution and poverty, its neighborhoods and overlooked buildings, and the informal networks that made up the city.

Sarah Lorenzen, an architect and Cal Poly Pomona professor who was his friend for 20 years, recalled him driving to San Diego County to talk with Mike Davis. Lorenzen described him to AN as full of life and mischief, open and curious about everything. "He could really get people to talk," she said.

Ayyüce taught at Cal Poly Pomona and Woodbury University, and beginning in 2013 served as a full-time professor of architecture at East Los Angeles College. He was committed to community college education and to creating pathways into architecture for students who might otherwise have found the profession inaccessible. In 2011, Cal Poly Pomona students named him their "Most Inspiring Instructor" — an honor he frequently cited as a favorite.

His teaching at East Los Angeles College pushed beyond conventional architectural education. He encouraged students to investigate cities through observation, mapping, photography, interviews and fieldwork. In 2017, while teaching at Escuela Libre de Arquitectura in Tijuana, he developed "Constellations of Tijuana," an urban research project that brought these methods together to document the border city through multiple perspectives.

For more than two decades, Ayyüce worked with Archinect as a senior editor, writer, interviewer and contributor. He interviewed architects including Frank Gehry, Carme Pinós and Francis Kéré, while using the platform to draw attention to people and projects he believed deserved greater recognition.

Ayyüce's interests sat deliberately outside the architectural mainstream. He championed the work of architect Glen Small, organizing the 2013 exhibition "Glen Small: Recovery Room" and documenting Small's ecological and urban research. After learning of the deteriorating condition of Richard Neutra's VDL Research House, he used his writing to support its preservation. The house, which Neutra built in 1932 and rebuilt with his son Dion after a 1963 fire, is owned by Cal Poly Pomona. Ayyüce brought his students there regularly.

Noam Saragosti, who met Ayyüce as a Cal Poly Pomona student and hosted those tours, recalled lively, funny exchanges as they showed classes through the rooms. In a tribute posted after Ayyüce's death, Saragosti wrote that Ayyüce "really cared to make sure his students soaked up the architecture."

Ayyüce also participated extensively in the Archinect Forum, where his long-running "Thread Central" discussion became one of the site's most expansive conversations. For him, architectural culture was inseparable from disagreement, exchange, friendship and the messy process of talking through ideas.

As an architect, Ayyüce ran an independent practice focused largely on residential and small commercial projects — but his career reached well beyond building. Teaching, writing, criticism, preservation, research and community-building formed interconnected parts of his work, rooted in his own experience as an immigrant and observer.

In a 2012 interview with PBS SoCal, Ayyüce described arriving in Los Angeles as "love at first sight," recalling the familiarity he found in its climate, vegetation, coastline and dense urban corridors. That affection never meant overlooking the city's problems. "I am a resilient character," he said. "I enjoy and identify with big, complex cities like this one."

In 2026, AIA Los Angeles named Ayyüce "Educator of the Year," recognizing decades of teaching and mentorship. He is survived by his wife, Tina, and his family, along with generations of students, colleagues, architects, writers and friends across Los Angeles and beyond.