The final project of the courses ARCH101 and ARCH121 were both about the building Cinnah 19. We were expected to write comprehensive essay on the building for ARCH 121 and produce a informative poster which includes both axonometric and ortographic drawings and sketches. Here it is.
Category Archives: ARCH121
Analysis of the Process
As of this week, the first semester of my architecture education is over. I need to say that it is fun but yet difficult and stressful. I had many sleepless nights, trying to get everything done untill the submission hour. I literally lived in studio, using my table as a bed. Despite all the difficulties, creating something new is a wonderful feeling. No matter how good or bad it is, the important thing is what you have learned until the end product which is called the final project. In this post, I will try to explain my final project, its process and its relations with the other courses.
Everything has start with the trip of Dogan Printing Center. We have observed the printing process of a newspaper and we were expected to produce an abstract structure which represents our observations. The whole abstraction idea wasn’t new to us because we had already used this strategy in our previous assignments. While producing the abstract structure with an A3 sized styrofoam, we have participated a workshop about body music. This workshop basically teach us some new concepts such as repitation and rhythm. With the help of what we have learnt at the workshop, we have produced 3 sheets of tracing paper with drawing some lines on it. Of course it has to represent of our abstract structure.
At the same time we have always weekly reading assignments on the course ARCH 121, History of Art and Architecture. We have read the Regulating Lines written by Le Corbusier. It made me realize the importance of the regulating lines and I have used those lines in my project. Then we took the next step, in this step we have got 3 materials and 4 layers. We were expected to produce a 2D design with one cartridge paper, two acetate sheets and a wire. This step was the step where we are forget about the Dogan Printing Center. In this step we have to take just the previous project and its regulating lines into consideration. It is the stage that we have split with the idea of printing process.
In the following step we have to exploded our 4 layers and produce a 3D construct. We have used stick form elements which are plastic sticks and tried to make the project stable. The gaps between the layers can be decided by us. Meanwhile in the course ARCH 111, we have made an exercise called sketch problem. We have produced little 3D models with corrugated cardboard by using some series of actions. These actions were folding, copying, extending, extruding, rotating, shifting and so on. It has been a practice for us, because we have used these actions for our 101 project. After the 3D product, we were asked for merging the layers by dissolving them with the actions that I mentioned before.
I have started this process by preparing some tracing papers that show my regulating lines and I decided everything on that piece of paper. While applying them to my project, I realized that some of them just don’t work. It was impossible to see them on the paper, so I’m glad that I had tried and saw that it fails before it’s too late. Then we experienced our first pre-jury. After that I started to shaped and named my project in order to the criticts that I learnt from the prejury. Weeks were passing through and I was still trying and trying over again. I redo my project like a dozen times. In the meantime by the whole designing process I’ve always ask myself a series of questions. “What is this?”, “Why is that here?”, “Is there a reason?”. I think it is the most helpful thing I’ve ever done to myself through the working process. At some point I’ve become a jury to myself and question everything.
My theme was Labyrinth, I chose it because my project has the continuity of planes like a labyrinth. I applied 5 actions: folding, extending, rotating, copying and moving and shaped my project into these series of actions. The last day we have change our working models into a brand new model. We were expect to create a flawless model. Then the very first jury day has arrived. It was very scary actually, I wouldn’t think that I will be that excited. But at the end of the day, the process is more important than just the final project itself. And I have learnt many things that I will use for 7 more semesters.
Ornament and Crime
This week’s reading assignment was Ornament and Crime by Adolf Loos, an Austrian architect.
At first he compares Papuan and modern man and gives and example. He says if a Papuan kills his enemy and eats, it will be totally normal. But if a modern man does that, it will be considered as a crime. Therefore the cases can differ to the era, location, nation or moral values. Then he connects this example with the using of ornament. He thinks that ornament was good in the history, but it just isn’t now. Moreover it’s too bad that almost a crime! Nope, I totally disagree with him. I think categorizing something with sharp boundries is wrong. It isn’t like there are only black and white in the world, there can be grey too. In fact there is grey.
Writer supports that the ornament and decorations are unnecessary in 20th century. He is also stated that it’s waste of money. Because when the fashion changes, people feel the necessity of buying the new one. So it’s not only economically harmful, but also waste of human labor and materials. I have to say, I agree with that thought. Actually in my opinion it’s the same for everything related with fashion.
I don’t totally agree or disagree with him. I think ornament should exist until a certain level. Of course there is no necessity of ornament, to make that thing beautiful. But it’s true it has totally contribution. It gives value to a product, if it’s not too much of course. In fact everything with a right amount, looks beautiful.
- Loos, Adolf. “Ornament and Crime” in: Conrads, Ulrich (ed.) Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture, The MIT Press, 1975
The City Image and Its Elements
”The City Image and Its Elements”, which is retrieved from “Image of the City” written by Kevin Lynch is our reading assignment for this week. According to Kevin Lynch, there are five elements that create a city image. These are paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. I thought some examples about these five elements in my city, Ankara. Let me share them.
1. Path
Turan Gunes Boulevard
2. Edge
Eymir Lake
3. District
METU Campus
4. Nodes
Kızılay Square
5. Landmark
Atakule
Basic Observations
This week’s reading assignment was “Basic Observations” from the book Experiencing Architecture written by Steen Eiler Rasmussen. I really like the text in terms of context and content. Writer introduced a lots of opinions and prove them with some easy examples.
At the beginning of the text, writer defines architecture as a fine art. Then he starts to compare architecture with different fields of art or different professions.
For Rasmussen, architecture is not produces simply by adding plans and sections to elevations. It’s something more than that. It’s impossible to explain. Art shouldn’t be explained, it must be experienced.
Architects are like sculptures, plays with form and mass. But differently architecture is a functional art which creates practical solutions to daily problems. Sculpture is limited to the geometric shapes, no matter how abstracted it is. Since it doesn’t provide utility, it cannot be accepted as architecture.
When you look from an aeroplane, every building looks like blocks and some forms to you. But if you look from lower side, then those forms transform into a building. They took on human scale, become houses for humans again. So architecture is for human beings and formed to be lived in, not seen from the outside.
The architect is also like theatrical producer. They both plan the settings of a man’s life.
The writer mentiones a good point with a good example. Here in the picture below, is Christian IV as interpreted by a popular Danish actor riding a bicycle. The costume, of its kind one if the best ones, and the bicycle too is of the best. But they look ridiculous. In the same way, it’s impossible to take over the beautiful architecture at the past era, it just becomes wrong.
The architect also has something in common with the landscape gardener. No matter how beautiful the plants are, it will be failure if it’s not right environment for those plants. Plants are exactly like humanbeings, and the architect is also works with living things like a gardener.
“One of the prooves of good architecture is that if it is being utilized as the architect had planned.”
When compared to the other arts, architecture has a special quality of its own and great clarity.
As the writer mentioned in the example (the one with the boys playing with a ball) they experienced it. Like discovering the direction of wind by sucking finger and sticking in the air. In conclusion by a variety of experiences, man quite instinctively learns to judge things.
According to Rasmussen, to understand and experience the architecture you have to be aware of the observations of forms such as hardness, softness, heaviness, lightness…
- Rasmussen, S.E. “Basic Observations” in: Experiencing Architecture, Chapman & Hall, 1959, pp.9-34.
My Experiences
It has been a month since I begin to study architecture. In this very short term, I can easily say that being an architecture student is more complicated than I thought. Though, it is still an enjoyable process for me. So I wanted to talk about my learnings, my experiences and my lessons so far.
There are so many things that comes to my mind while thinking this process. At the very first week, after the first assignment was given (the one with the paralel lines) I really didn’t know what to do. On 6th day, I sat up all night just to finish my project. But now when I look behind, it was one of the most stupid things I’ve ever done. The assignment is not even that difficult, it doesn’t supposed to take that long. So after this, I learned that I have to use my time wisely.
Studying architecture has a different technique in comparision with the other fields. This is not about a teacher who explains what’s right or what’s wrong and a student who directly copies that fact. In fact, so far we always do discussions in the studio. Because architecture is not a science which has rights and wrongs in it, it’s more like subjective thing. So it’s very important to talk and discuss everything and espacially with everyone; not only with teachers but also with other students, maybe some other friends to understand how is it looks from outside. It really helps us to improve our work. That’s why we do the rewised versions of our project, right after all discussions.
We need to give more importance to listen and join the discussions even tough it’s not about your project. We can also learn a lot from someone else’s job by finding something in common. Basically, our learning process consists of the discussions we made.
The most important rule I’ve learn so far is: Work clean! It really changes a lot.
While making this drawing assignment, I suffered from the cleaning issue a lot. And also I realize how important working with plan is. I think it must be the first thing while starting a project. Working with plan helps you to control the progress of your work. By the help of the plan, you can know what you will have at the end, and you can be familiar with the potantial problems that you can face. So it really shorten the working process, in a healthy way. Making a sketch or preparing a diagram can also help too.
The first thing that I’ll consider next time I’ll make a model is trying it first. Trying to work with the smaller version of your project or some part of it will totally help you to get familiar with the material. And if it didn’t work, you’ll have always a chance to redo it. And you big part of your material wouldn’t be ruined.
From the poster design assignments, which I like most, I learned a lot. Everything has to connect with other things. Every little thing that you put there must have a reason. We should always have an answer for the question “Why?”.
We also have reading assignments that we need to summerize at the end of the week. Those are also as important as the other assignments we have. We have studied some parts of a few book so far such as Le Corbusier Towards a New Architecture, Jormakka, Kari Basics Design Methods. Unwin, S. Analysing Architecture. From those texts, I noticed some thoughts in common. For instance; they all talk about balance, continuity, proportion, regulating lines, primary forms and rhytm.
Regulating lines lead us to find relations between elements in a structure. Using proportions make the design more legible. Proportion gives harmony and sense of order. And the order is provided by balance. But balance is not only provided by symmetry. And so on…
About the keyword rhytym, I have lots of things to say. Last week we experienced a body music workshop with Ozgu Bulut. Beside how enjoyable it was, we learned so much from it. By the end of the workshop we have tried to make music compositions with our body and our voice. And then we split 4 groups and do the different compositions from each other. It showed us how we can create a harmony with lots of different things on top of each other.
Comparison: “Regulating Lines” and “Music and Mathematics as Model”
In this week, our reading assignment was study the texts “Regulating Lines” in “Towards a New Architecture” written by Le Corbusier and “Music and Mathematics as Models” in “Basic Design Methods” written by Kari Jormakka and compare them in terms of both context and content.
Le Corbusier introduces the concept of regulating lines. This concept comes from the primitive man. The primitive man created a living space with using his extensions as a measurement unit. He used his arm, foot, finger etc. and created a perfect relation and proportion between himself and the place. According to Le Corbusier, using proportion creates a harmony and also gives a sense of order.
They are both agree about using proportions make the design more legible. But Le Corbusier believes in the power of proportions so much that he strongly believes golden ratio is the key to beauty. On the other hand Kari Jormakka doesn’t believe that golden ratio always reflects the beautiful one. Even though he supports the harmony which given by proportions, he doesn’t feel the same way about golden ratio. He believes that it has boundries and certain rules that it can limit the thinking process easily.
In his book, Kari Jormakka explains using music as a model. It’s about imitating the music into forms. He thinks that the notes, rhythms and pitches can refer a spatial form. And he also gives some examples about some designers who use music while designing a structure’s regulating lines.
We can say that they are both agree with the importance of the proportion. But they have their own methods for it.
Le Corbusier. “Regulating Lines”. Towards a New Architecture. New York: Dover Publication, 1986 (originally 1931). pp. 65-88
Jormakka, Kari. “Music and Mathematics as Models”. Basics Design Methods. Basel: Birkhauser, 2007. pp. 20-32
From Text to Poster
It was a joint assignment of the courses ARCH111 and ARCH 121, so it was not only designing but also a reading assignment. We need to study the text “Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture” and find some keywords from the text. Then what we need to do is prapering a poster with given sizes as an interpretation of what we understood from the text about the topics Mass and Surface. The poster should include those keywords that I mentioned, an alternative title that we are supposed to find. We also allowed to use an image in an abstract manner.
I preferred to use a black-and-white photograph for the background and I made it semi-transparent in order to make the words readable. I also used different font sizes to emphasize the important words.
Introducing Arch Theory
This week’s reading assignment was a text from the book “Introducing Arch Theory” by Frank Lloyd Wright. Some new terminologies are introduced such as function, purpose and continuity.
One of the terms which had mentioned in the text was function and the concepts Functionalism and Post-functionalism. Modernists saw functionalism as the function turns into a form. However post-modernists pulled function and form apart.
Richard Hill had explained the relationships among these terms in a very easy way which took my attention. He argued that “purpose” is the reason why a building exists, but the “function” is the consequence and the outcome of presence of a building. And the “use” involves the activities of that building.
According to Wright, continuity is about both form and function. The elements of building like wall, floor and ceiling should be the part of each other. I think the best example of this definition of continuity is the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In his buildings, Frank L. Wright introduced some planes which are parallel to the earth to emphasize the third dimension. As used in the Imperial Hotel at Tokyo, I think it looks really cool.
- Wright, F. L. “Excerpts from: An American Architecture”, in: Smith, K. (ed.) Introducing Architectural Theory, New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 184-188
First Reading Assignment: Architecture and Building
We were given a reading text that helps us to understand what architecture is and we were asked for to write a personal report about it. I think the text was clear and easy to understand and also gives us an idea about few different topics like architecture in the past, the role of an architect, heroic architecture and so on.
First thing that mentioned in the text was the definition of architecture. According to every different dictionary, architecture is defined as the art or science of building, or as one of the fine arts. The answer of ‘What is architecture’ is also explained but I guess it’s a controversial and subjective issue. But in some people’s opinion there is a certain difference between architecture, building and engineering and compare with others architecture is seen as art, however building and engineering are seen as utilitarian.
The topic ‘the role of the architect’ is also mentioned in the text and it seems the most important thing to me. An architect needs to know the history and how we arrived at today. Because, to understand history helps us to understand our development. And architects should understand people and their needing.
This sentence in the last paragraph proves the importance of architecture and architects:
“Architecture provides the environment for our lives. Buildings are not just places of physical shelter, but places in which our social rituals are enacted.”
Heroic architecture was also explained in the text briefly. I think the concept of the heroic architect relates partly to the romantic view of architects as artists. In other words, it’s more “individual”, I guess. We can give examples like Eiffel Tower in Paris, Tower Bridge in London and the Taj Mahal in India and Sydney Opera House in Sydney.
The bridge named Gateshead Millennium Bridge took my attention because of its functionality and also its appearance.
- Conway, H. and Rowan R. “Architecture and Building” in: Understanding Architecture: An Introduction to Architecture and Architectural History. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 9-32.
Melis Kucuktunc 