Orhan Ayyüce

Orhan Ayyüce was a Turkish-born American architect, educator, writer and longtime Archinect senior editor whose criticism, teaching and community-building shaped Los Angeles architectural culture for more than two decades. He died suddenly on 20 September 2026 at his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he had recently moved with his wife, Tina, to begin retirement in La Luz del Oeste, the Antoine Predock-designed community that had become especially meaningful to him. Archinect founder Paul Petrunia announced the loss on 21 September 2026, remembering him as a devoted contributor, collaborator and friend whose generosity and attention reached across generations.

Born in Izmir, Turkey, Ayyüce came to the United States in the mid-1970s after a hitchhiking year and a call from his sister in Sacramento. He learned English quickly, enrolled in community college, and was steered toward architecture by instructor Walter Harvey. A chance meeting with critic Esther McCoy at an AIA convention led him to SCI-Arc in Santa Monica. He studied there from 1978 to 1981, in the school's early experimental years after Ray Kappe and colleagues had broken away from Cal Poly Pomona. He later wrote and spoke often about that radical optimism, and about living and working inside the school itself.

Ayyüce became a licensed California architect and AIA member with an independent practice focused largely on residential and smaller commercial work. Selected projects included the Malama Learning Center, a Silver Lake residence and Cubes; he also received an honorable mention in the Istanbul Community Market Ideas Competition. Teaching mattered as much as practice. He taught architecture and urban design at East Los Angeles College, where he defended community-college education as a serious path into the profession, and also taught at Cal Poly Pomona, Woodbury University and Escuela Libre de Arquitectura in Tijuana. Cal Poly Pomona students named him Most Inspirational Instructor (AIAS) around 2010-2011. In 2026 AIA Los Angeles named him Educator of the Year alongside Heather Roberge.

From the early 2000s he was one of Archinect's most constant voices: interviewing, reporting, arguing in the Forum and connecting people. Under the username abracadabra he launched Thread Central in 2006, a sprawling meta-discussion that grew past 80,000 posts. He organized and curated Glen Small: Recovery Room (2013), helped press the case for Richard Neutra's VDL Research House when it was in disrepair, and wrote about industrial Los Angeles, Vernon, Tijuana and Izmir with the same insistence on overlooked places. He reserved extraordinary attention for colleagues he believed architecture culture had undervalued, and for students who had not entered the field through its most privileged channels.

He died at the start of a retirement he had looked forward to sharing with Tina in Albuquerque. His birthday fell on 23 September; the exact birth year is not stated in the principal public obituaries. Archinect, AIA Los Angeles and the wider Los Angeles architecture community marked his death as the loss of a connective presence who made the person in front of him feel important, and who spent more energy promoting others than promoting himself.