Organization of the Courses & Planning Studios

Organization of the Courses & Planning Studios

With respect to the principles outlined in the philosophy behind the undergraduate program, three basic principles have guided the design of changes to be realized in the program:

1. The suggested changes should be realistic with respect to the available academic staff, technical infrastructure and the theoretical background and experience and should not have an adventurous nature.

2. Planning studios supported by a limited number of major courses should form the basic pillar of the new undergraduate program. All the theoretical preparation courses should be given in the first and second years and students should be provided with a few major courses of strategic importance and a large number of elective courses in the third and fourth years.

3. As the first and second-year studio programs aim to help students to comprehend the system concept, attain the ability of representation, develop initial design skills, and a design language; whereas the third and fourth-year studio programs aim to allow the interaction of students following differentiated elective courses in various options and to develop the ability to make a synthesis. For this reason, the first and second-year programs as well as the third and fourth-year programs are organized so as to form two separate wholes. The transition between these two differentiated studio stages will be realized by means of the summer practice organized to collect data for the second stage. When the planning studios offered in our Department are organized parallel to the new program, it will be possible to obtain a new sequence of courses. This new sequence of courses achieve a support from this program and makes the courses more relevant within the semester and thus increase the interest in the courses and planning studios. The new organizations related to this sequence of courses will be presented in the following section. The organization pattern and basic principles of the planning studios which are considered to be the basic pillar of the whole program are set out in detail below.

The new organizations related to planning studios will provide the following advantages:

a. reduction in certain types of work, such as data collection and basic map preparation, which are necessary but which have a low level of conceptual and theoretical contribution,

b. minimization of repetitions of exercises and topics in subsequent years,

c. a considerable increase in the time spent on discussing the planning problematic and solution proposals.

With respect to these evaluations, the main targets of the first stage studios comprising the first and second year studios and the second stage comprising the third and fourth year studios can be specified in the above mentioned way.