Sustainability in the Architectural Design Studio: A Case Study of Designing On‐Campus Academic Staff Housing in Konya and Izmir, Turkey

Abstract

It is important to engender a 'sustainable’ architectural consciousness in the students who will be the next generation architects. In architectural education, design decisions taken during the early phases of the design process play an important role in ensuring concern for the sustainability issue. But, in general, all discussions about the site that have been held since the beginning of the semester get forgotten, and at the end of the design process students usually create projects that ignore the site criteria. In this article, a specific teaching methodology which supports the sustainability issue in the design studio is presented as a teaching/learning experience. The article is an overview of the design studio process illustrated by a case study on academic staff campus housing in Konya and İzmir, Turkey. To solve the same problem with the same brief in different regions requires developing sensitivity to climate issues. The resulting product is good evidence that teaching about sustainability in the design studio is effective.

Creativity Methods in Teaching the Arch-Design Studio

“…Therefore the general consensus is that creativity should and continue to be the main force in teaching the arch-design studio. This is the purpose of this study and these various authors stress, argue and support the concept and ideas of creativity in teaching the design studio to bridge this gap and agree that it is an important venture (Olotuah, 2001(Olotuah, , 2007(Olotuah, , 2012Adeyemi, 2000Adeyemi, , 2012Buchanan, 2012;Bala, 2010;Koutsoumpos, 2007;Kowaltowski, 2009;Crul and Diehi, 2010;Parashar, 2010;and the UIA/UNESCO 2002, 2003.…”

“…The teacher must be talented at crit and the participation of the practitioners should be a selection of the interested and experienced, who have actually designed and built projects (Adeyemi 2012). Students can be asked to demonstrate their analyses as sketches, models, scenario discussions, posters, 2D and 3D images, initial site plan drawings and physical models to be completed on a small scale (Bala, 2010).…”

A Cross‐Cultural and Interdisciplinary Collaboration in a Joint Design Studio

“…Students adopted the concept of sustainability in developing solutions for affordability. In the design domain, the concept of sustainability is associated with eco-friendly or green designs focusing on green spaces in neighbourhoods, energy savings in building construction and maintenance and environmental pollution reduction (Buys et al 2004;Priemus 2005;Bala 2010). In addition to an environmentally sustainable approach, students emphasised the concept of a sustainable community, in which residents would continue to live after settlement redevelopment.…”

“…Cross-cultural collaboration in architectural design might have practical value for creative thinking because a crosscultural setting requires interaction between heterogeneous members in which there is a search for and acquisition of knowledge (Herring 1999). Such interactive dialogue could facilitate students' divergent thinking by increasing their chances of working in an interdisciplinary perspective, and thus becoming aware of the Bala (2010) also found that a cross-cultural design studio enhanced students' awareness of sustainability issues by creating a learning synergy in the area of sustainable architecture. Collaborative design studios could be designed to inspire students' creative thinking abilities through explorative exercises in a cultural context.…”

From Sources to Solution

“…As in sustainability discipline, several examples of case study can be identified i.e. whole-system concept of sustainability (Greenhalgh et al 2012;Nguyen and Bosch 2012;Isenhour 2010), good governance (Syed Muhammad and Anwar 2006), economic (Taplin et al 2006) and architectural design (Bala 2010). The strategy used for data collection includes document analysis, interview, and observation.…”