ENVIRONMENT FOCUSED DESIGN: INTEGRATING THE KNOWLEDGE INTO ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN EDUCATION

The basic goal of architectural education is to carry the student to a level of reaching an architectural product that can be considered as successful, when judged according to universal parameters of design and to express this product in required standards. The goal of architectural education is to redound a whole set of methods, until reaching to a point of maturation, leading to an intuitive design act with a background of sufficient knowledge and experience.

This tough process has two components; one is the theoretical and practical lectures, the other is the architectural design studios as the trial arena of all these knowledge and as student’s main indicator of the level of professional maturation. While the main goal of theoretical and practical lessons is to pass on the knowledge, needed to develop and present an architectural project, another significant goal is to teach ‘how’ to use this knowledge in the formation of an architectural product.

On the other hand, environment-focused design concept, initiating the generation of extremely striking ideas in a global scale and provoking extraordinary buildings to arise, is more and more accepted and appreciated by larger audiences. In fact, this movement already exists for a long time as a thought and design strategy.

Academicians’ role in this matter is to impose and test the required knowledge. It is not yet possible to mention that this awareness and apprehension has attracted enough importance in the architecture arena. By reflecting all of this knowledge into architectural studios, environment-focused design criteria should be applied and tested on architectural products. Knowing the environment-focused design criteria theoretically does not necessarily mean that the student will be able to use these effectively and for the exact purpose. Using knowledge requires various kinds of experiences. Yet, students will be able to gain the ability to use the knowledge according to the major goal of the architectural profession, with the help of architectural design studios. For this reason, every level of architectural design activity should contain certain amounts of apprehension about environment-focused architectural design. Besides, the students have to be persuaded about the vitality and inevitability of environment-focused architectural design for the ecosphere. Students have to believe the significant importance of this matter in advance, to be persuasive, when faced with reverse market pressure in their professional life.

For this purpose, a case study has been carried out among architecture students. A design problem has been given and asked to solve it, according to the experience and knowledge they got from the lectures in the existing architectural education system. In this stage of the experiment, the students were no longer intervened. In the second stage of the study, environment-focused design concept and energy generation processes via active methods were systematically explained, the explanations were supported with up-to-date examples and the students were asked to re-solve the problem accepting the environment-focused design parameters as the main design parameters.

In the last stage of the study, a comperative analysis of the products has been made for both of the products. The collection and analyses of data has been continuing and the results will be discussed in the conference.