Alican Taylan, MArch, MEng, is a Ph.D. student in the History of Architecture and Urban Development (HAUD) at Cornell University, where he studies nineteenth-century environmental and colonial history. His dissertation committee is co-chaired by Esra Akcan and María González Pendás (HAUD), and Aaron Sachs (History) is his third committee member. Recently, he curated Strategic Landforms (2024) at Cornell AAP, an exhibition about French military architectural production in Senegal over the nineteenth century. The exhibition questioned the role of colonial infrastructure in modernization processes in West Africa. His current areas of research interest include turn-of-the-century socialist utopianism, the environmental assumptions of modern architecture, colonial infrastructure in nineteenth-century West Africa, and modernist architect Tony Garnier’s functional urbanism.

From 2018 to 2022, he was a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute's graduate architecture program. He contributed to various exhibitions, including co-curating Confronting Carbon Form (2023), first shown at The Cooper Union, which explored innovative disciplinary approaches to addressing environmental concerns in architecture. He was a co-curator of the exhibition Aesthetics of Prosthetics (2019) at Pratt Institute's School of Architecture. He contributed to the 2018 Turkish pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

His work has been supported by grants from institutions including the Architectural League, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Graham Foundation, the Institute for European Studies and the Einaudi Center at Cornell University, the Cornell Council for the Arts, and Pratt Institute. His writing and work have been featured in various journals, periodicals, and co-edited volumes, including Log, Metropolis Magazine, Mimar.ist, NYRA, Plat, and The Architect's Newspaper. He previously worked in the offices of architects Peter Eisenman, Shigeru Ban, and Thomas Leeser.