Students’ Approach to Architectural Design in Developing Urban Areas: A Studio Experience

Abstract

One of the research themes about developing urban areas has been the degree to which urban and architectural design education has been contributing. It argues that students of architectural design studio should be capable of analyzing site specific factors in urban developing areas with different characteristics from the traditional city context and be able to achieve fulfilment in the realization of their personal projects. The design studio, an essential part of architectural education, helps students’ interpretation of design problems in relation to the given context, which includes the site and the surrounding urban settings. This paper is an effort to analyze the students’ works examining the contextual features of a developing urban area in Istanbul. The paper is about the study conducted in the Fall Term of level three architectural design studio, which tackled the design problem in a developing urban area of Istanbul in the Başak neighborhood of Başakşehir District. The study examines the contextual factors that students prioritized and how they applied such factors in design proposals for several site options. The study proceeds in two steps the first which is to get feedback from students by Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), and the second, is the evaluation of these feedbacks among the student projects. According to the study findings ‘topography’ scored highest as a physical asset while ‘population demography’ scored the lowest priority as a social asset in the case of developing urban context.