Journal Articles by Bihter Almaç
Liminalities, UOU scientific Journal, vol 7, 2024
This research discusses three subsequential architectural essay films within their context of mak... more This research discusses three subsequential architectural essay films within their context of making. These films are performative autotopographical practices that attempt rather uncanny narratives of the home through drawings, filming, and model-making both as collective and individual. We claim that the performative making of architecture essay films is liminal, as it interweaves multiple forms of recording and many states of subjective encounter to build a spatial narrative. And, the liminalities that we magnify trace the multitudes of creative and imaginative mistranslations of monologues, dialogues, and polylogues that shapeshift into architectures, blurring the definite and established threshold of the home.
Architecture Image Studies, 2023
A Conversation from the Wild Fields of Architecture is a set of drawings that are conceived and b... more A Conversation from the Wild Fields of Architecture is a set of drawings that are conceived and built as a visual transcript. The imagined conversation is between John Hejduk and myself through the mechanism of his Masques and by my interventions. In this paper, I discuss the Masques of John Hejduk as representing architecture's otherness, set alongside Michael Hays' discussions of the Late Avant-Garde and Roland Barthes' ideas about the creation of the new. And within this context, the conversation piece aims to greet the Masques in their peculiar way that they demand; by the blurring of authorship in an a-synchronous collaborative creative work in which the others/observers stimulate the outcome as a performance. A Conversation from the Wild Fields of Architecture is thus an experiment resides at the initial point of departure from normative architecture by meeting instead the other condition where speculation is in fact the only accurate act of engagement.
UOU scientific journal, 2021
This research is my account of imagining our houses
as Rangers, speculating on them through their... more This research is my account of imagining our houses
as Rangers, speculating on them through their
spatial, perceptual and timely transformations due
to the Covid19 lockdown regulations. They are from
Istanbul where the lockdown regulations came out
to be dramatic, political and extravagant. I discuss
the notion of home as such that enacts like a folly in
the conditions of the Covid19 pandemic. Imagining
their stories in the form of architectural drawing, I
aim to unfold their folly-ness as I believe drawing is
the realm of another kind of architecture where the
performative existence of its characters is prominent.
Rangers defne critical, situated positions of the
uncanny in the home as we face the pandemic,
which is a creative response of observing and
recording; a spatial making of another kind.
The International Journal of Art and Design Education, 2018
This article discusses the idea of otherness in design education and introduces a new approach th... more This article discusses the idea of otherness in design education and introduces a new approach that merges the potentials of collaborative and individual design. The aim is for each individual student to discover how others design to criticise and derive their own ways of designing. Therefore, the discussion here focuses on the process of becoming aware of other designers and the importance of being with others while designing. I call this state the Field of Otherness. It is something that cannot be described or taught; it is a relative and indeterminate zone based on the existence of others. It is a set of potentials in which designers oscillate and their design aspects merge into a multiplicity. In this article I argue that by discovering others, designers encounter each other in the Field of Otherness and this enables them to design diversely. To broaden the discussion within this context, an experimental one‐day project called the Factory is explored. The main idea of the project was to introduce students to the Field of Otherness, in which they would design by continual ‘as ifs’ and oscillations to meet the other; who is precisely unfamiliar, unexpected, unknown and inexperienced. Interviews with students three months after the project are used to investigate the effects. These interviews can also be seen as fragments of the otherness experience of the students.
The International Journal of Design Education, Jun 2015
This paper is about a design task of three weeks in first year undergraduate Architectural Design... more This paper is about a design task of three weeks in first year undergraduate Architectural Design studio. The task was called ‘Places of Curiosity’ and introduced to students with a text of three different depictions of the same place. The main motivation of this design task was for students to encounter with many possibilities and probabilities of places and also to comprehend the close relationship of topography and architecture.
The design task started with reading the text. The text was a narration of a place consisted of three layers, named respectively as; the end (tip), transition and the root. The text depicted the curiosities and astonishments of topography triggered by this layered place. And it was narrated from the aspects of three different people with different experiences. The place was diverted into multiple places as it was depicted from the experiences of these three different people. After reading the text, students were asked to design the topography and the three-layered place, which would trigger one of the curiosity experiences of the three people in the text.
In this architectural design task the experiences, feelings and embodiment of place were more important than a building program. The task needed students to design both the topographical context and architectural concept within. First, students played with micro and macro scales of things to create a possible topography together with the places of curiosity. Then, they focused on the text and try to decipher the experiences in order to design the places of curiosity.
Briefly, this paper aims to stimulate a fact that how narration and embodiment of experiences trigger a probable architecture, releasing students to design something out of curiosity and astonishment.
The International Journal of Design Education, Jan 2016
The paper discusses a design, production and a representation task of a three week period practic... more The paper discusses a design, production and a representation task of a three week period practiced with the first year undergraduate architectural design students. The task was called as ‘Gaze machines of Field’ and there were three steps introduced: the field, the gaze and the machine respectively. The main concern of the design task was to explore the potentiality of the view, the focus and the tool of intervention and produce new scapes and scopes among them in collaboration with other studio participants.
The first step of the task was the field, which was a physical, topological, existential, intuitional and instrumental investigation of the study area. The second step was the gaze, which was building the context and all the necessary and possible interconnections and interpenetrations between the subject, the design object and the field. The third step was the machine, which was requiring and involving the design and the production of the one-to-one scale gazing machines. Machines were placed in the field and exhibited for several weeks. After all these steps, students were asked to prepare a section of the project including the view, the viewer, the machine, the field and the transformation of the viewer and the view during their interrelation with the machine.
To sum up, the paper aims to discover and discuss the expansion and the transformation of the design problem and its outputs with putting the body into equation through an analysis of the gaze.
Papers by Bihter Almaç
Stories of Situated Pedagogies in Architecture and ..., 2024
This conversation is built upon the states of crisis and attached reclaims over the urban
for the... more This conversation is built upon the states of crisis and attached reclaims over the urban
for the alienated, neglected, marginalised – othered bodies of all sorts in presenting
a critical exploration of the role of interdisciplinarity and the multitudes of scales of
inquiry within a design studio. The quest for improbability to implement and reflect upon
the debates of our ‘troubled times’(1) by the common design studio environment and
curricula highlights the need for crucial change in the design pedagogy and process.
Our first-year design studio SpacelyandGood (2), is an interdisciplinary one that is used
as a medium to discuss potential and ethical responses that can operate in troubled
times. It aims to provide a platform to transfuse highly controversial into the static,
conventional expectancies of first-year design studios as a performative act both for
the tutors and students (3), whereas the process and outcomes are the mediums for
performative exploring. Then, the design studio environment tends to create ephemeral
interconnections among its participants without a hierarchical order, unlike the tutors
taking the lead and students following them (4).
Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures Conference, 2022
This article, oscillating between subjective and collective making and knowing, explores essayist... more This article, oscillating between subjective and collective making and knowing, explores essayistic filmmaking as a way of critical spatial research. Essayistic making interweaves “the transitional, unauthorised and relatively formless shape of subjectivity” with the curious investigations and active observations of the filmmaker (Alter and Corrigan, 2017). Embodying the characteristics of time-based media and the essayistic form as reflectivity and openness (Rascaroli, 2021), architectural essay film as practice discussed by Haralambidou (2015) enables a reciprocal mode of filmmaking, architectural design and theory research. The paper explores this peculiar mode of essayistic making to multiply and situate critical spatial wanderings through negotiations on two individually produced essay films and proceeds with a third film produced collectively. Placeholder (2022) considers home as void and traces its layered meanings through taking the inventory of personal domestic objects that are circulating between houses lived in at different times, together with the rituals and memories entailed to these objects. Nothing Happens (2022) explores and redefines home from the individual position of the author by investigating the daily routine of working, studying and filming from the kitchen table with references to the prominent attempts of feminist practitioners. The gestures and wanderings of the two films initialise the third one in search of memory, void, rituals, and the mundane at another homely place constructed by the collective spatial imaginations. In Peeling Off (2022) three researchers work collectively to unveil the interstices of the void of Casa Botter, an old dilapidated art nouveau apartment in Istanbul. This research enables the authors to wander around their individual, collective and critical positions simultaneously by discussing, making, viewing, and reflecting; questioning the possibilities of spatial research within the threshold of the essayistic.
Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe (eCAADe) [Volume 1]
This study presents a pedagogical experiment on the integration of AI into the project studio in ... more This study presents a pedagogical experiment on the integration of AI into the project studio in the early stages of design education. The motivation of the study is to support creative encounters in design studios by promoting student-design representation, student-student, and student-artificial intelligence (AI) interaction. In the scope of this study, a short-term studio project is used as a case study to examine these creative encounters. The experiment covers five stages that enable a recursive analysis-synthesis action. The stages include (i) precedent analysis of a given set of building façades images, (ii) feature extraction, (iii) composing new façade representations through employing previously generated features, (iv) training an AI by the use of styleGAN2-ADA with the outcomes of stage 3, (v) Use of synthetically generated façade images as a design driver. The pedagogical experiment is evaluated through the lenses of novelty, style, surprisingness, and complexity concepts. The challenges and potentials are introduced, as well as elaborations on the future directions of the interplay between AI-oriented making and first-year student making.
Tez (Yüksek Lisans) -- İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü, 2011Thesis (M.Sc.) ... more Tez (Yüksek Lisans) -- İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü, 2011Thesis (M.Sc.) -- İstanbul Technical University, Institute of Science and Technology, 2011Çalışma, kentin bütünündeki sürekli devinimin bireylerce nasıl deneyimlenebileceği sorusu ile başlar. Bu soruyu açabilmek için kentin sürekli devinimi ve bireylerin bu devinimlerdeki etkileşimi, bireylerin kent mekanlarını algılaması araştırılır. Soru ve devamında araştırma, mekan kıvrımları düşüncesini çalıştığı Mecidiyeköy sahası üzerinden kurar. Çalışma kıvrımın potansiyellerini ve düşünce kurgusunu mekanların okuması ve tasarlanması aracı olarak kullanır. Kıvrımların potansiyelleri günümüz kentiyle iç içe geçmiş bireyleri, birbirlerinden ayrılamaz bütünlükleri, yoğunluklar olarak tanımlar. Olağan kent okumalarının ve çalışmalarının aksine kent kıvrımlarda dinamiklerini yoğunluklar üzerinden görünür kılabilir. Mekan kıvrımları ise bu dinamiklerin sürekli değişen etkileşim mekanlarıdır. Günümüz kenti tüm davranı...
-en dessin / -in drawing - École de design Université du Québec à Montréal 15-16 septembre, 2022
Though well known for its Late Byzantine/Paleologan era extensions and decoration (14th century),... more Though well known for its Late Byzantine/Paleologan era extensions and decoration (14th century), the material evidence on the structural layers of the katholikon of the Chora monastery reaches back to 6th century. On the historical peninsula of Istanbul, it was situated within the uninhabited areas outside the 4th-century Constantinian walls but within the 5th-century Theodosian walls. Thus, despite being intra–muros, the meaning of its name, Chora, refers to the rural character of its location. It has been subject to multiple structural changes and repurposed during its afterlife as an Ottoman and, later, a Republican monument. Given its shifts and conversions, Chora is enwrapped with unique layers both structural and immaterial, each layer enabling unprecedented associations with its articulated discrepant narratives thus redefining the architecture’s immaterial spatiality.
Kariye through the Looking-Glass is a pursuit in the form of drawings. Here, the act of drawing is an inquiry into the intricate Byzantine spatial making and the immateriality of Chora’s architecture. Similar to Lewis Carroll’s story, this research uses drawing as a passage through a looking-glass to reveal Chora’s complex and richly decorated interiors and its multi-dimensional inner space that never offers a clear perception of the whole.
Given this complexity, the Byzantine church cannot be fully understood using common methods of architectural representation. Unveiling Chora is a series of explorations on the reconfigurations of drawings that enable us to encounter the complexity of this structure.
The initial drawing set is an inquiry into the multi-coloured marble surfaces of the structure. They are arranged in book-matched panels forming symmetrical and continuous lines on each page in order to create an endless, consistent surface where all the niches and corners of the interior unfold. Chora unveils as a single wall with strange spatial implications. The drawing further investigates the psychedelic, inkblot-like visuals of the marble surfaces. Similar to the builders of Chora, layering and configuring the veneer as they install the plates, the drawing traces the veins of the marble surfaces. Enacting their construction in the form of drawing is a form of mimicry, a reflection with a means to exceed the visit of the 21st-century monument.
Co-creating the Future: Inclusion in and through Design - Proceedings of the 40th Conference on Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe (eCAADe 2022), Pak, B, Wurzer, G and Stouffs, R (eds.), Ghent, 13-16 September 2022, pp. 133–142, 2022
This study presents a pedagogical experiment on the integration of AI into the project studio in ... more This study presents a pedagogical experiment on the integration of AI into the project studio in the early stages of design education. The motivation of the study is to support creative encounters in design studios by promoting student-design representation, student-student, and student-artificial intelligence (AI) interaction. In the scope of this study, a short-term studio project is used as a case study to examine these creative encounters. The experiment covers five stages that enable a recursive analysis-synthesis action. The stages include (i) precedent analysis of a given set of building façades images, (ii) feature extraction, (iii) composing new façade representations through employing previously generated features, (iv) training an AI by the use of styleGAN2-ADA with the outcomes of stage 3, (v) Use of synthetically generated façade images as a design driver. The pedagogical experiment is evaluated through the lenses of novelty, style, surprisingness, and complexity concepts. The challenges and potentials are introduced, as well as elaborations on the future directions of the interplay between AI-oriented making and first-year student making.
Architectural Education and the Reality of the Ideal: Environmental design for innovation in the post-crisis worldAt: Napoli, Italy Volume: ENHSA & EAAE International Conference, European Network of Heads of Schools of Architecture European Association for Architectural Education, 2013
This paper will discuss the required skill sets for an ecologically wise design approach, and the... more This paper will discuss the required skill sets for an ecologically wise design approach, and the methods needed for their acquisition through a range of projects realized in the Spring semester of 2013 within the curriculum of Istanbul Technical University School of Architecture as a first year architectural design studio assignment.
The studio assignment, which is to be analyzed and discussed is called ‘Wetlands’, and it is the last project of a group of first year students, namely ‘Otherminds’1, within the Spring semester of 2013. The brand name ‘Otherminds’ is chosen to identify the group and its production in an effort to accentuate the need to understand other minds, such as the minds of our ancestors, the mind of the nature, the mind of the wind etc. alongside our very own minds and their internal workings as estranged phe- nomena. The metaphor of ‘getting into another one’s mind’ is used as a pedagogical method in various assignments throughout the year, such as the initial one-day ex- periments of the first semester, which involved making masks for one another, or the collaborative design-assembling task, ‘The Factory’, whereby students were encour- aged to meet each other on the grounds of their designing and try to understand the other’s mind through their design. Six week long ‘Wetlands’ project, which aimed to get into the nature’s mind by merging ‘topophilic’ 2 manners with the designing act while facing ‘real’ problems, was the last and final leg of discovering the other’s mind.
Online Education: Teaching In a Time of Change Amps Conference 21-23 April, 2021
This paper discusses our attempt to reclaim the first-year design studio inside the parental home... more This paper discusses our attempt to reclaim the first-year design studio inside the parental home under COVID19 lockdown regulations. Studying design, needlessly to say, rarely go well with parents. When the lockdown measures were introduced and Universities closed doors, most of the students went back to their parental home. Though our brief for the duration was settled, Heterotopias – Alternative Imaginaries, we had to tweak the hands-on making for the online design studio. Therefore, we planned a design-making approach that responds to many odds of online design education. This making approach we presume called out bold and daring side of the first-year student and helped them to claim their designing realm in their parental house.
“The Loop of projecting: tracing: cutting: modeling: drawing” was the primary design-making approach that we tend to hold throughout the studio. The initial task was to prepare a more or less 180x140cm surface and cover it with a drawing-friendly material. We also asked them to collect objects with various materiality and texture. We started the loop by projecting shadows from the gathered objects; creating varieties by playing with the distance to the light source and projected surface. We asked them to trace the ephemerality of these projections by drawing, cutting, and modeling. There were several cycles of this kind of making. At some point, we announced that this was the Imaginary Topography of their heterotopic scenarios. So they began to explore their shadow tracings as a hybrid-topographical formation with clues to their heterotopic scenarios.
The absence of an actual studio in online education has been immensely discussed however, the probability of its unfamiliar setting is usually disregarded. This paper follows our teaching experience within the focus of an overlooked social aspect of online design education. The loop of projections is a timely spatial design making; it would deploy its realm on surfaces as the projections last. This enchantment bends the reality of the parental house. And as tutors, we can talk through these projections as if spatially experiencing them. This is a witty threshold of making and speculating design; we are back inside Plato’s Cave, not interested in the reality behind the shadows but fascinated by the realm of anamorphic, distorted projections. Tracing out the ephemerality of shadows, getting lost at the conjunctions with each cycle of making extends the probabilities of online design education with a twist of hands-on making.
Online Education: Teaching in a Time of Change Conference 21-23 April Amps Proceedings, 2021
This paper takes on a long been used design education approach, learning from the precedents, to ... more This paper takes on a long been used design education approach, learning from the precedents, to tackle the earlier uncertainty of Covid19 lockdowns. Architecture Making Trivia is a four-session online workshop with first-year design students. It was when the lockdown measures were just introduced, universities closed doors and most of the students went back to their family homes. This was a limbo moment for our design studio. The Faculty asked us to refrain from any sort of design-related activities. And the resume date was unsettled.
Picture John Hejduk’s Wall House on your mind and re-imagine it with these features; slightly off proportioned, colours somehow matching, one room has letters from a famous cologne brand and another room has a telephone number printed on. Or, remember Terunobi Fujimori’s Takasugi-An, raised fairly above wooden pillars, now re-imagine it with a folded, bent Birkenstock box on uneven wooden brushes. Or Steven Holl and Vito Acconci’s Storefront with a magenta pink potato sack bursting out from the rotating surfaces towards the front street. In Architecture Making Trivia, the brief was to find drawing sets of a project from the list of architectures and make models. The workshop was not about making the exact model, but to follow their interest in these projects and reflect it to the making. The only rule was to model by reclaiming the materials of commonly used things during the lockdown. In the first two sessions, we have talked about the projects in general and their plans for model making. In the third session, I introduced a reading set for each project and asked students to think of their projects through their context. The aim was for them to develop a critical approach to the project rather than referring to the projects with generic information. There were twenty-three voluntary students and thirteen projects.
Initially, this workshop aimed to keep the students engaged with the design studio during all the turmoil. The unexpected twist of the process was about the lockdown materials. This approach glitched the realm of the precedents with the new-normal everyday and added another narrative. In the last session, I asked them to write the story of each material they have used. Then, the precedents became mementoes of their lockdown days. This was the very reason that students thought of these projects as their own. The solid gap between these architectures and the first-year design students crumpled. Using the precedents as a conversation starter (or here as the means of making) elevated the variety of architectural design explorations. In this paper, I aim to rethink learning from the precedents as an anchor to explore the probabilities of an online first-year design studio, and, Architecture Making Trivia is the research of this attempt.
The Bartlett School of Architecture, 2018
Cumulus Hong Kong 2016 Cumulus Working Papers, 2016
Unexpected Encounters is an architectural board game for two players, in which these players crea... more Unexpected Encounters is an architectural board game for two players, in which these players create diagrammatic models of 'the home' they imagine against and with each other, and in which this act of play creates a spatial language that results in unexpected narratives of the notion of domesticity. The research element of the game focuses on how 'place' and 'placelessness' are constructed and interpreted through our innate creativity by manipulating the intricate operations of initial design decisions. This exhibition is a performance of o2: U E, where designers meet with others through their imaginations.
Adapt-r, Creative Practice Conference: Making Research & Researching Making International Conference, 10- 12 September 2015, Aarhus School of Architecture, Aarhus, Denmark, ISBN: 8790979443. , 2015
This research focuses on a paradoxical attempt in designing. It is about a practical inference on... more This research focuses on a paradoxical attempt in designing. It is about a practical inference on distraction through experiments. It aims to emerge architectures of 'un-thought' by obscuring the boundaries of architectural task. Here, distraction, disguised as text, meets the architect as the sole input of the design. This is an unbounded, non-structured text that leads to the imaginary. The text triggers hidden connections of non-conscious and 'un-thought'. Throughout the process, the architect becomes the distracted-being. Distracted creativity therefore reconstructs the architect and the architectural space that they create, together. The main product of the various experiments in this research is a booklet. It summarises and describes my adventurous pursuit of a role for the architect as a distracted being, and in doing so it also seeks to expose the limitations of the metamorphosis of written text into architectural space. Traces of these non-conscious elements – various sketches, drawings and writings – are embedded in the booklet. Then the final outputs of the experiment are the self-portraits, which are the depictions of the wild realms of Improbable Architectures.
Uploads
Journal Articles by Bihter Almaç
as Rangers, speculating on them through their
spatial, perceptual and timely transformations due
to the Covid19 lockdown regulations. They are from
Istanbul where the lockdown regulations came out
to be dramatic, political and extravagant. I discuss
the notion of home as such that enacts like a folly in
the conditions of the Covid19 pandemic. Imagining
their stories in the form of architectural drawing, I
aim to unfold their folly-ness as I believe drawing is
the realm of another kind of architecture where the
performative existence of its characters is prominent.
Rangers defne critical, situated positions of the
uncanny in the home as we face the pandemic,
which is a creative response of observing and
recording; a spatial making of another kind.
The design task started with reading the text. The text was a narration of a place consisted of three layers, named respectively as; the end (tip), transition and the root. The text depicted the curiosities and astonishments of topography triggered by this layered place. And it was narrated from the aspects of three different people with different experiences. The place was diverted into multiple places as it was depicted from the experiences of these three different people. After reading the text, students were asked to design the topography and the three-layered place, which would trigger one of the curiosity experiences of the three people in the text.
In this architectural design task the experiences, feelings and embodiment of place were more important than a building program. The task needed students to design both the topographical context and architectural concept within. First, students played with micro and macro scales of things to create a possible topography together with the places of curiosity. Then, they focused on the text and try to decipher the experiences in order to design the places of curiosity.
Briefly, this paper aims to stimulate a fact that how narration and embodiment of experiences trigger a probable architecture, releasing students to design something out of curiosity and astonishment.
The first step of the task was the field, which was a physical, topological, existential, intuitional and instrumental investigation of the study area. The second step was the gaze, which was building the context and all the necessary and possible interconnections and interpenetrations between the subject, the design object and the field. The third step was the machine, which was requiring and involving the design and the production of the one-to-one scale gazing machines. Machines were placed in the field and exhibited for several weeks. After all these steps, students were asked to prepare a section of the project including the view, the viewer, the machine, the field and the transformation of the viewer and the view during their interrelation with the machine.
To sum up, the paper aims to discover and discuss the expansion and the transformation of the design problem and its outputs with putting the body into equation through an analysis of the gaze.
Papers by Bihter Almaç
for the alienated, neglected, marginalised – othered bodies of all sorts in presenting
a critical exploration of the role of interdisciplinarity and the multitudes of scales of
inquiry within a design studio. The quest for improbability to implement and reflect upon
the debates of our ‘troubled times’(1) by the common design studio environment and
curricula highlights the need for crucial change in the design pedagogy and process.
Our first-year design studio SpacelyandGood (2), is an interdisciplinary one that is used
as a medium to discuss potential and ethical responses that can operate in troubled
times. It aims to provide a platform to transfuse highly controversial into the static,
conventional expectancies of first-year design studios as a performative act both for
the tutors and students (3), whereas the process and outcomes are the mediums for
performative exploring. Then, the design studio environment tends to create ephemeral
interconnections among its participants without a hierarchical order, unlike the tutors
taking the lead and students following them (4).
Kariye through the Looking-Glass is a pursuit in the form of drawings. Here, the act of drawing is an inquiry into the intricate Byzantine spatial making and the immateriality of Chora’s architecture. Similar to Lewis Carroll’s story, this research uses drawing as a passage through a looking-glass to reveal Chora’s complex and richly decorated interiors and its multi-dimensional inner space that never offers a clear perception of the whole.
Given this complexity, the Byzantine church cannot be fully understood using common methods of architectural representation. Unveiling Chora is a series of explorations on the reconfigurations of drawings that enable us to encounter the complexity of this structure.
The initial drawing set is an inquiry into the multi-coloured marble surfaces of the structure. They are arranged in book-matched panels forming symmetrical and continuous lines on each page in order to create an endless, consistent surface where all the niches and corners of the interior unfold. Chora unveils as a single wall with strange spatial implications. The drawing further investigates the psychedelic, inkblot-like visuals of the marble surfaces. Similar to the builders of Chora, layering and configuring the veneer as they install the plates, the drawing traces the veins of the marble surfaces. Enacting their construction in the form of drawing is a form of mimicry, a reflection with a means to exceed the visit of the 21st-century monument.
The studio assignment, which is to be analyzed and discussed is called ‘Wetlands’, and it is the last project of a group of first year students, namely ‘Otherminds’1, within the Spring semester of 2013. The brand name ‘Otherminds’ is chosen to identify the group and its production in an effort to accentuate the need to understand other minds, such as the minds of our ancestors, the mind of the nature, the mind of the wind etc. alongside our very own minds and their internal workings as estranged phe- nomena. The metaphor of ‘getting into another one’s mind’ is used as a pedagogical method in various assignments throughout the year, such as the initial one-day ex- periments of the first semester, which involved making masks for one another, or the collaborative design-assembling task, ‘The Factory’, whereby students were encour- aged to meet each other on the grounds of their designing and try to understand the other’s mind through their design. Six week long ‘Wetlands’ project, which aimed to get into the nature’s mind by merging ‘topophilic’ 2 manners with the designing act while facing ‘real’ problems, was the last and final leg of discovering the other’s mind.
“The Loop of projecting: tracing: cutting: modeling: drawing” was the primary design-making approach that we tend to hold throughout the studio. The initial task was to prepare a more or less 180x140cm surface and cover it with a drawing-friendly material. We also asked them to collect objects with various materiality and texture. We started the loop by projecting shadows from the gathered objects; creating varieties by playing with the distance to the light source and projected surface. We asked them to trace the ephemerality of these projections by drawing, cutting, and modeling. There were several cycles of this kind of making. At some point, we announced that this was the Imaginary Topography of their heterotopic scenarios. So they began to explore their shadow tracings as a hybrid-topographical formation with clues to their heterotopic scenarios.
The absence of an actual studio in online education has been immensely discussed however, the probability of its unfamiliar setting is usually disregarded. This paper follows our teaching experience within the focus of an overlooked social aspect of online design education. The loop of projections is a timely spatial design making; it would deploy its realm on surfaces as the projections last. This enchantment bends the reality of the parental house. And as tutors, we can talk through these projections as if spatially experiencing them. This is a witty threshold of making and speculating design; we are back inside Plato’s Cave, not interested in the reality behind the shadows but fascinated by the realm of anamorphic, distorted projections. Tracing out the ephemerality of shadows, getting lost at the conjunctions with each cycle of making extends the probabilities of online design education with a twist of hands-on making.
Picture John Hejduk’s Wall House on your mind and re-imagine it with these features; slightly off proportioned, colours somehow matching, one room has letters from a famous cologne brand and another room has a telephone number printed on. Or, remember Terunobi Fujimori’s Takasugi-An, raised fairly above wooden pillars, now re-imagine it with a folded, bent Birkenstock box on uneven wooden brushes. Or Steven Holl and Vito Acconci’s Storefront with a magenta pink potato sack bursting out from the rotating surfaces towards the front street. In Architecture Making Trivia, the brief was to find drawing sets of a project from the list of architectures and make models. The workshop was not about making the exact model, but to follow their interest in these projects and reflect it to the making. The only rule was to model by reclaiming the materials of commonly used things during the lockdown. In the first two sessions, we have talked about the projects in general and their plans for model making. In the third session, I introduced a reading set for each project and asked students to think of their projects through their context. The aim was for them to develop a critical approach to the project rather than referring to the projects with generic information. There were twenty-three voluntary students and thirteen projects.
Initially, this workshop aimed to keep the students engaged with the design studio during all the turmoil. The unexpected twist of the process was about the lockdown materials. This approach glitched the realm of the precedents with the new-normal everyday and added another narrative. In the last session, I asked them to write the story of each material they have used. Then, the precedents became mementoes of their lockdown days. This was the very reason that students thought of these projects as their own. The solid gap between these architectures and the first-year design students crumpled. Using the precedents as a conversation starter (or here as the means of making) elevated the variety of architectural design explorations. In this paper, I aim to rethink learning from the precedents as an anchor to explore the probabilities of an online first-year design studio, and, Architecture Making Trivia is the research of this attempt.
as Rangers, speculating on them through their
spatial, perceptual and timely transformations due
to the Covid19 lockdown regulations. They are from
Istanbul where the lockdown regulations came out
to be dramatic, political and extravagant. I discuss
the notion of home as such that enacts like a folly in
the conditions of the Covid19 pandemic. Imagining
their stories in the form of architectural drawing, I
aim to unfold their folly-ness as I believe drawing is
the realm of another kind of architecture where the
performative existence of its characters is prominent.
Rangers defne critical, situated positions of the
uncanny in the home as we face the pandemic,
which is a creative response of observing and
recording; a spatial making of another kind.
The design task started with reading the text. The text was a narration of a place consisted of three layers, named respectively as; the end (tip), transition and the root. The text depicted the curiosities and astonishments of topography triggered by this layered place. And it was narrated from the aspects of three different people with different experiences. The place was diverted into multiple places as it was depicted from the experiences of these three different people. After reading the text, students were asked to design the topography and the three-layered place, which would trigger one of the curiosity experiences of the three people in the text.
In this architectural design task the experiences, feelings and embodiment of place were more important than a building program. The task needed students to design both the topographical context and architectural concept within. First, students played with micro and macro scales of things to create a possible topography together with the places of curiosity. Then, they focused on the text and try to decipher the experiences in order to design the places of curiosity.
Briefly, this paper aims to stimulate a fact that how narration and embodiment of experiences trigger a probable architecture, releasing students to design something out of curiosity and astonishment.
The first step of the task was the field, which was a physical, topological, existential, intuitional and instrumental investigation of the study area. The second step was the gaze, which was building the context and all the necessary and possible interconnections and interpenetrations between the subject, the design object and the field. The third step was the machine, which was requiring and involving the design and the production of the one-to-one scale gazing machines. Machines were placed in the field and exhibited for several weeks. After all these steps, students were asked to prepare a section of the project including the view, the viewer, the machine, the field and the transformation of the viewer and the view during their interrelation with the machine.
To sum up, the paper aims to discover and discuss the expansion and the transformation of the design problem and its outputs with putting the body into equation through an analysis of the gaze.
for the alienated, neglected, marginalised – othered bodies of all sorts in presenting
a critical exploration of the role of interdisciplinarity and the multitudes of scales of
inquiry within a design studio. The quest for improbability to implement and reflect upon
the debates of our ‘troubled times’(1) by the common design studio environment and
curricula highlights the need for crucial change in the design pedagogy and process.
Our first-year design studio SpacelyandGood (2), is an interdisciplinary one that is used
as a medium to discuss potential and ethical responses that can operate in troubled
times. It aims to provide a platform to transfuse highly controversial into the static,
conventional expectancies of first-year design studios as a performative act both for
the tutors and students (3), whereas the process and outcomes are the mediums for
performative exploring. Then, the design studio environment tends to create ephemeral
interconnections among its participants without a hierarchical order, unlike the tutors
taking the lead and students following them (4).
Kariye through the Looking-Glass is a pursuit in the form of drawings. Here, the act of drawing is an inquiry into the intricate Byzantine spatial making and the immateriality of Chora’s architecture. Similar to Lewis Carroll’s story, this research uses drawing as a passage through a looking-glass to reveal Chora’s complex and richly decorated interiors and its multi-dimensional inner space that never offers a clear perception of the whole.
Given this complexity, the Byzantine church cannot be fully understood using common methods of architectural representation. Unveiling Chora is a series of explorations on the reconfigurations of drawings that enable us to encounter the complexity of this structure.
The initial drawing set is an inquiry into the multi-coloured marble surfaces of the structure. They are arranged in book-matched panels forming symmetrical and continuous lines on each page in order to create an endless, consistent surface where all the niches and corners of the interior unfold. Chora unveils as a single wall with strange spatial implications. The drawing further investigates the psychedelic, inkblot-like visuals of the marble surfaces. Similar to the builders of Chora, layering and configuring the veneer as they install the plates, the drawing traces the veins of the marble surfaces. Enacting their construction in the form of drawing is a form of mimicry, a reflection with a means to exceed the visit of the 21st-century monument.
The studio assignment, which is to be analyzed and discussed is called ‘Wetlands’, and it is the last project of a group of first year students, namely ‘Otherminds’1, within the Spring semester of 2013. The brand name ‘Otherminds’ is chosen to identify the group and its production in an effort to accentuate the need to understand other minds, such as the minds of our ancestors, the mind of the nature, the mind of the wind etc. alongside our very own minds and their internal workings as estranged phe- nomena. The metaphor of ‘getting into another one’s mind’ is used as a pedagogical method in various assignments throughout the year, such as the initial one-day ex- periments of the first semester, which involved making masks for one another, or the collaborative design-assembling task, ‘The Factory’, whereby students were encour- aged to meet each other on the grounds of their designing and try to understand the other’s mind through their design. Six week long ‘Wetlands’ project, which aimed to get into the nature’s mind by merging ‘topophilic’ 2 manners with the designing act while facing ‘real’ problems, was the last and final leg of discovering the other’s mind.
“The Loop of projecting: tracing: cutting: modeling: drawing” was the primary design-making approach that we tend to hold throughout the studio. The initial task was to prepare a more or less 180x140cm surface and cover it with a drawing-friendly material. We also asked them to collect objects with various materiality and texture. We started the loop by projecting shadows from the gathered objects; creating varieties by playing with the distance to the light source and projected surface. We asked them to trace the ephemerality of these projections by drawing, cutting, and modeling. There were several cycles of this kind of making. At some point, we announced that this was the Imaginary Topography of their heterotopic scenarios. So they began to explore their shadow tracings as a hybrid-topographical formation with clues to their heterotopic scenarios.
The absence of an actual studio in online education has been immensely discussed however, the probability of its unfamiliar setting is usually disregarded. This paper follows our teaching experience within the focus of an overlooked social aspect of online design education. The loop of projections is a timely spatial design making; it would deploy its realm on surfaces as the projections last. This enchantment bends the reality of the parental house. And as tutors, we can talk through these projections as if spatially experiencing them. This is a witty threshold of making and speculating design; we are back inside Plato’s Cave, not interested in the reality behind the shadows but fascinated by the realm of anamorphic, distorted projections. Tracing out the ephemerality of shadows, getting lost at the conjunctions with each cycle of making extends the probabilities of online design education with a twist of hands-on making.
Picture John Hejduk’s Wall House on your mind and re-imagine it with these features; slightly off proportioned, colours somehow matching, one room has letters from a famous cologne brand and another room has a telephone number printed on. Or, remember Terunobi Fujimori’s Takasugi-An, raised fairly above wooden pillars, now re-imagine it with a folded, bent Birkenstock box on uneven wooden brushes. Or Steven Holl and Vito Acconci’s Storefront with a magenta pink potato sack bursting out from the rotating surfaces towards the front street. In Architecture Making Trivia, the brief was to find drawing sets of a project from the list of architectures and make models. The workshop was not about making the exact model, but to follow their interest in these projects and reflect it to the making. The only rule was to model by reclaiming the materials of commonly used things during the lockdown. In the first two sessions, we have talked about the projects in general and their plans for model making. In the third session, I introduced a reading set for each project and asked students to think of their projects through their context. The aim was for them to develop a critical approach to the project rather than referring to the projects with generic information. There were twenty-three voluntary students and thirteen projects.
Initially, this workshop aimed to keep the students engaged with the design studio during all the turmoil. The unexpected twist of the process was about the lockdown materials. This approach glitched the realm of the precedents with the new-normal everyday and added another narrative. In the last session, I asked them to write the story of each material they have used. Then, the precedents became mementoes of their lockdown days. This was the very reason that students thought of these projects as their own. The solid gap between these architectures and the first-year design students crumpled. Using the precedents as a conversation starter (or here as the means of making) elevated the variety of architectural design explorations. In this paper, I aim to rethink learning from the precedents as an anchor to explore the probabilities of an online first-year design studio, and, Architecture Making Trivia is the research of this attempt.