A GRADUATION PROJECT EXPERIMENT

Underlining the significance of picking an instructive subject for the architectural design problem, this paper aims at presenting the process and results of the graduation project, discussing the students’ conception of said design problem, and comparing the projects in terms of conceptualization and representation.

The Graduation Project, while providing students with a unique opportunity to develop some ideas which convey the students’ own personal attutides using certain representation techniques they have acquired throughout their undergraduate education, at the same time seems an appropriate setting and period of experimentation to review the curriculum.

In the Spring term of 2010, the students were asked to design a psychiatric hospital with 180 beds, and to consider the psychological dimension of the architecture in addition to its aesthetic and functional dimensions in order to expose the students to a wider evaluation of architecture and the unenviable situation of certain human beings, i.e., to work toward the development of a critical understanding about the complexities of the interface of architecture and psychiatric disorders.With that in mind, the students, over the course of the semester, interpreted the physical, psychological and programmatic requirements of the given problem.

In the end, seeking the answers to the conceptual and representational problems, the final products were highly suitable for the classification of attitudes and for comparsions. Moreover, student presentations provided the faculty with an opportunity to evaluate the students’ knowledge and skills and, considering all the actors, to redefine the organizational principles of the graduation project for future semesters as well.