METU Department of Architecture

The five-week project at the end of the first semester of Basic Design aimed for the students to overview and exercise skills acquired during the entire Fall term. In the first of its three stages of the project, students individually contemplated on a short story of their choice. They analyzed the story as an assembly of the main spaces expressed in it. In abstract models constructed out of strings in a cubic frame, students studied five of these spaces in terms of how they are connected or separated, what their components and spatial qualities are, whether characters move from one to another, and what the boundaries or transitions in-between may be. In the second stage that followed, students extracted planar elements defined by the strings within the cube. Recreating these elements in materials such as wire mesh, metal plate, plastic sheet, and balsa, they went onto reformulate their spatial relations in a new composition. For the student proposals produced in this stage, a jury with outside reviewers was held two weeks prior to the final submission date. Following up on the jury comments, in the third stage of the assignment, students were asked to analytically reflect on their proposals by forming ‘libraries of relations of design elements’ to be used to further develop and refine their designs.
Throughout the assignment, which was a trajectory across different modes and models, from interrelated spaces envisioned in a work of literature to three-dimensional compositions in varying materials, students found themselves in the position of having to continually transform design elements, their relations, and unifying principles.

Promenade in Sığacık

Arch 102 Introduction to Architectural Design
Projects

The five-week long third and final project of the Spring semester, pursued the design of Sigacik waterfront area as an outdoor public environment that may host functions such as exhibiting archaeological findings from nearby antique city of Teos, and that positively responds to the local historical and natural values, the daily life, and the strong relation with the water. In line with what students have learnt throughout their first year, they were expected to design a complex spatial system that depends on unit-whole relations, all within a rich context, and to be able to utilize these unit-whole relations in the application of a designated construction system.