Architectural Design Studio

Considering the producers and consumers, one of the fastest-growing industries in the world today is the video game industry. Video games have become an important marketing product with the combined use of art, design, architecture, science and technology. Video games compete with each other through features such as theme, character, sound-image quality, venue diversity, graphic elements, virtual reality content, and trigger the development of this sector with the constantly increasing expectations of the target audience. While the education on the architectural producing processes and architectural productions on professional discussion platforms try to find their balance with their evolving dynamics, video games offer users opportunities for space production in various forms of their own reality, whether they are experts or not. Besides, spaces designed in 3 dimensions allow the user not only to obtain information from a facade surface but also to experience the space with its visually accessible feature from many different directions. The student profile, also called "digital native" in architectural education, cannot use traditional tools as a learning method. In this context, video games, which have been questioned for a while as an educational tool in architecture, equip the user with their dystopian content called 'new old', both provide users with historical events and refer to the principles of structuring in a variety of individual spaces ranging from the urban scale within a social and economic context. During the process, environmental elements are perceived and experienced by using more sensory organs than with physical methods. In this study, first of all, "new old" video game fictions produced by reinterpreting the events in human history and adapting them to the future are examined together with their historical origins and the achievements regarding the history of architecture are analyzed. Afterward, readings are made on dystopian video games and the elements analyzed from the content of the games are compared with the dynamics of architecture. In the light of the data obtained, this study discussing the methodology of how architecture, which is a production tool, can be

Mekândan söz etmek, mekânın üretiminde rol oynayan tüm aktörleri ve süreçleri bütünsel değerlendirmeyi gerektirir. Mekânın üretiminde rol oynayan aktörler ise sadece insanlar değil. Son yıllarda yaşanan salgınlar ve küresel iklim felaketleri, insanı doğadan üstün gören ya da doğa ile toplumu iki ayrı varoluş alanı olarak kabul eden düşüncenin yıkıcı sonuçlarını bir kez daha gösterdi. Bu sebeple, sosyal bilimlerde yeniden tartışılmaya başlanan doğa-toplum ayrımının, mimarlık alanında da daha çok tartışılması gerekli. Mekânın toplumsal bir üretim olduğunu söyleyen mekân teorilerinde, bu ayrımın sorunsallaştırıldığı ve gündelik hayatın akışını değiştiren hayvanlar üzerine de düşünüldüğü görülür. Bu kapsamda çalışmada; doğa, toplum, mekân kavramları hayvanlar üzerinden ele alınarak, bu konuda Mardin Artuklu Üniversitesi, Mimarlık Bölümü'nde 2021-2022 eğitim-öğretim dönemi güz yarıyılında yapılan bir mimari tasarım atölyesi ile ilgili bilgiler paylaşılıyor. "Sokak Hayvanları için Geçici Tedavi ve Rehabilitasyon Merkezi" isimli bu projede genelde tüm sokak hayvanları, özelde ise Mardin'in tarihi kent merkezinde, çöp toplama ve malzeme taşıma işlerinde çalıştırılan eşekler ile turizm alanında çalıştırılan atlar üzerine sorgulamalar yapıldı. Kentin topografyası ve yaz aylarındaki aşırı sıcak iklim şartları düşünüldüğünde bu hayvanların yaşadığı zorluklar gözlemlendi. Mimari tasarım atölyesinde bu konuda yapılan tartışmalarla birlikte, bu hayvanların yaşadıkları sorunlara çözüm önerileri getirmek için mimari üretimler yapıldı. Yapılan bu çalışmanın, hayvanlarla birlikte daha adil yaşam arayışının sürdürülmesine katkı sağlaması ve bu konuda mimarlık alanında bir farkındalık yaratması umulmaktadır.

Architectural knowledge has a dynamic character and can be discovered collectively during architectural education. The place of this discovery and production process can be considered as the "studio" and this studio doesn't have to be limited in a building. To extend the limits of the studio to city scale creates new opportunities both for the students and the locals. Visiting different parts of the city and converting those places into a studio triggers encounters. Every encounter is a creative and productive act. As a course of its nature, the city is the place of confrontations and encounters. Being, producing and discussing in the city creates an atmosphere where intellectual, imaginative and creative encounters emerge. This emergence can be considered as a flashmob. Flash-mobs demonstrate the power of bodily experience and highlights the importance of performativity. Each student constructs a mental and muscle memory by his/her own bodily experience during the studio hours in the city. This experience let us to create an extra curriculum such as historical, socioeconomical, natural and cultural aspects and everyday life practices of the place. In this paper, I would like to discuss my way of teaching as a retroactive research. I prefer to use the city-Istanbul-as a studio and visit different parts of it for my courses. In this way, an architectural course turns into a retroactive research based on bodily experience. Each event of perception opens up to its own world and the world of perception is merged with the real world itself. When you use the city as a studio, the dynamic character of architectural knowledge unfolds itself and extends its content. In this critical pedagogy, architectural education becomes interactive between the city users and the students and transforms both of them.

Mimarlık eğitiminin en önemli parçası olan mimari tasarım stüdyosu, 1960’lı yıllardan bu yana hem toplumsal hem de mekânsal sorunlara eğilmeye çalışıyor. Özgürleştirici bir mekân olarak kurgulanmaya çalışılan mimari tasarım stüdyosu, Türkiye’de çoğunlukla stüdyo yürütücüsü olan eğitmenin konumsallığı bağlamında tartışılıyor. Bu tartışmalarda stüdyo genellikle salt eğitimci perspektifinden, öncesi ve sonrası olmayan, kendi içine kapalı, üniversiteye ait bir mekân ve zaman aralığı olarak ele alınıyor. Makalede alternatif bir rotadan ilerlemeye, feminist pedagojinin sunduğu araçlar vasıtasıyla öğrencinin katılımını öne çıkarmaya ve yürütücünün konumsallığının ötesine geçmeye çalışıyorum. Bunu yapabilmek için de Türkiye’de mimari tasarım proje stüdyosunda eleştirel düşünme ile özgürleşmesini umduğumuz mimarlık öğrencisinin yolculuğunu anlamaya çalışmayı öneriyorum: Güncel yerel bağlamlar içinde, mimarlık öğrencisi mimari tasarım stüdyosu öncesi, sırası ve sonrasında ne gibi tahakküm ilişkileri deneyimliyor? Bu ilişkiler mimarlık ile nasıl kesişiyor? Otobiyografik hikâyeler ve gözlemlerimi irdeleyerek, mimari tasarım stüdyosunda deneyimlenen fakat dillendirilmeyen bir ayrışma ve ayrımcılık zemini üretildiğini tartışıyorum. Sınıfsal boyutu ağır basan bu zemin eril, elit ve Batılı aktörlerce baskılanan mimarlık alanında sürekli olarak yeniden üretilen modern/geleneksel, Batılı/Batılı olmayan, taşra/büyükşehir ikilikleriyle kesişebiliyor. Türkiye’de stüdyo eğitiminde daha kapsayıcı bir tutum yaratabilmek için öğrencilerin farklı kimliklerini ve deneyimlerini stüdyoya davet etmeyi; benzer bir yaklaşımla, stüdyo sonrasında mimarlıkta maruz kalınması muhtemel kırılganlıklara ilişkin sorgulamaları stüdyodaki eleştirel düşünmenin bir parçası haline getirmeyi öneriyorum.

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Looking at the Architectural Design Studio with a Feminist Eye: Understanding the Journey of Student

The architectural design studio, which is the most important part of architectural education, has been striving to deal with both social and spatial problems in Turkey since the 1960s. The design studio which is sought to be established as a liberating space is usually discussed in the context of studio instructor’s position. In these discussions, the studio is mostly argued from the educator’s perspective only, as an enclosed space and time owned by the university with no past and future. In this article, I try to take an alternative route to emphasise the participation of student and to go beyond the positionality of the educator by using the tools and inquiries offered by feminist pedagogy. To do this, I suggest that we need to understand the journey of the architecture student - the student that we try to liberate through critical thinking: What relations of domination does the architecture student experience before, during and after the architectural design studio in the current, local context? How do these relationships intersect with architecture? By examining my autobiographical stories and observations, I argue that a ground of segregation and discrimination experienced but not articulated in the architectural design studio. This ground, which is dominated by a class dimension, can intersect with constantly reproduced dichotomies (modern/traditional, Western/non-Western, provincial/metropolitan) of architectural fields that are suppressed by masculine, elite and Western actors. In order to create a more inclusive approach in the studio education in Turkey, I want to emphasise the importance of inviting different identities and previous experiences of the students to the studio; with a similar approach, possible vulnerabilities can be faced while practicing the architectural profession should be discussed as part of the critical thinking in the studio.

HOW SHALL WE TEACH ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN? ISSUES RELATED TO FORM ARTICULATIONS

Prof. Dr. Şengül Öymen Gür
T.C. Beykent Üniversitesi


Every fifty years or so, the design professors face a conundrum of teaching design in the studios. During the Bauhaus, the principles were evident, and design tools had an anteriority. Walter Gropius had made it very clear. The designs were purist and minimalist by collaborating with the industry that provided the necessary technological advancements. 
Around the 1970s, we were faced with another debate concerning the techniques. Many scholars got involved in the discussions of clarifying the phases and steps of design following the seminal work of Christopher Alexander. He had suggested de-composition and re-composition of the problem in his doctoral study. Based on human sciences knowledge, de-composition was understandable, but many debatable unconvincing techniques were set forward, and much scholarly energy was wasted in re-composition.
The third wave came along after the discovery of computer-aided design. Tools of rendering and submitting design had changed. It was soon followed by parametric design, which involved the conception of the design problem and its execution.  However, by learning parametric design, no one can learn how to produce healthy and enduring architecture.
We should distinguish between the essence and techniques in architectural design and employ this discernment in teaching architectural design studios. Thus, the value of this essay resides in its approach to understanding what architecture is and exploring ways of making it clear to the future generations of architects in design teaching.

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.

Architecture is a profession that requires collaboration among professionals from various fields. Despite the important nature of these interdisciplinary collaborations, architecture students rarely obtain the opportunity to learn about the work areas of other stakeholders and the practice of working together. In all sectors there is a growing need for professionals who possess in-depth knowledge in their own disciplines and also develop an understanding about other related disciplines. In a setting of a student project competition, this article examines how students from various AEC fields collaborate using BIM as a common data environment and emphasizes several considerations for implementing interdisciplinary collaborations in curriculums of architecture schools in students' perspective.

Architectural knowledge has a dynamic character and can be discovered collectively during architectural education. The place of this discovery and production process can be considered as the “studio” and this studio doesn’t have to be limited in a building. To extend the limits of the studio to city scale creates new opportunities both for the students and the locals. Visiting different parts of the city and converting those places into a studio triggers encounters. Every encounter is a creative and productive act. As a course of its nature, the city is the place of confrontations and encounters. Being, producing and discussing in the city creates an atmosphere where intellectual, imaginative and creative encounters emerge. This emergence can be considered as a flash- mob. Flash-mobs demonstrate the power of bodily experience and highlights the importance of performativity. Each student constructs a mental and muscle memory by his/her own bodily experience during the studio hours in the city. This experience let us to create an extra curriculum such as historical, socio- economical, natural and cultural aspects and everyday life practices of the place. In this paper, I would like to discuss my way of teaching as a retroactive research. I prefer to use the city – Istanbul – as a studio and visit different parts of it for my courses. In this way, an architectural course turns into a retroactive research based on bodily experience. Each event of perception opens up to its own world and the world of perception is merged with the real world itself. When you use the city as a studio, the dynamic character of architectural knowledge unfolds itself and extends its content. In this critical pedagogy, architectural education becomes interactive between the city users and the students and transforms both of them.

Using computational design methods, this study aims to analyze the effects of an integrated design process model on the ecological awareness of architectural students, and on their ability to incorporate ecological issues in their design work. To this end, two studies have been carried out. The first one involves a survey about how ecology-related and computational design courses complement the architectural design studio at different universities in Turkey. The second one, which is the main study of this paper, presents the results of an ecology-based computational design workshop. According to the results of the first study, computer-based design courses in Turkey usually lack the dimension of “computational thinking”, focusing only on computer-aided design tools. Moreover, we have also found out that ecology courses in Turkish architectural education are mostly elective, and hence, have only very indirect connection to the architectural design studio. In the second study, we have demonstrated how incorporating computational thinking into the design process increase students’ awareness of the ecological dimension and their ability to make this dimension an integral part of their projects. The paper concludes by elaborating on the importance of computational methods in architectural education.

The case study will examine online and face-to-face learning experiences of the two different groups of students who have never been enrolled in an interior design studio, where they see their classmates and encounter an "interior architecture" project as a problem for the first time. As the "living spaces" were the main problematic of this design studio, the interaction, the time management in design development, means of representation, inputs and outputs of the studio, perception of space and scale were the main parameters that differed and varied within separate learning environments, and will be read through the feedback of the students.

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to discover the efficiency of cooperative learning approach in architectural design education. The study was conducted with 23 architecture students from the first and third year students in February-March 2011, in Bursa, Turkey. Researchers adopted a qualitative research strategy since it enables a deeper understanding of the context. The result of this study indicated that cooperative learning method at various levels can be used as an effective learning method to increase motivation of students, sharing knowledge and increasing learning capacity. Furthermore, this study showed that cooperative learning method during the first year of architecture education simplifies understanding, comprehension, and interpreting project areas.