Designing a subway station for your campus: Case of transit architecture elective at AGÜ

Abstract

Transportation planning and design had been a major concern from the urban planning perspective. Various means of transportation have shaped our cities and landscapes for ages and by looking at transportation buildings from an architectural perspective one can see that existing studies focus on the building performance of the transportation buildings or the history of them. Consequently, transportation building design is an important concern that should be addressed from multiple perspectives. Starting from 2019-2020 Fall Semester, Abdullah Gül University Department of Architecture started a new elective course ARCD 110 Transit Architecture, focusing on this issue. While the main intention of the course is to develop a critical view on the existing prescriptive design methods related to the transportation buildings and their environment, students are expected challenge these discussions at their final projects. In order to develop a critical view on the existing design methods, a considerable part of the class focuses on the design guidelines and typologies of the buildings along with the history of the selected building types. In parallel, student presentations showing different examples throughout the world to inspect different design approaches as well as to start debates regarding various debates around design, global world, awards in architecture, and symbolism in architecture. Afterwards, the class turns into a discussion environment focusing on design issues not only related to transportation buildings but also to the rest of the design environment which they might encounter in the future. these discussions start from multimodal and micro mobile transportation possibilities followed by the personal space as a design parameter. These arguments are followed by sustainability from triple bottom line perspective and the possibilities of different technologies and their effect on the transportation related buildings. Meanwhile, they also experiment with simulation tools to test their design cases in different conditions. After the discussions and the debates students are tasked to design a subway station in front of their campus for a final project. After four semesters, this paper will present the aim of the course, the class structure, projects and the findings of the course with selected examples from the course students to its readers.