IN-PERSON Prague Research & Teaching Conference

Abstract

The evolution of our society is leading to increasing individualization with lives split into distinct phases, changing gender roles, a rise in average age, and changes in the relationship between living and working as part of a transformation from an industrial to a service economy. The consequence has been increasingly differentiated styles of living and dwelling. There are now various types of households tailored for singles, unmarried couples cohabiting, single parents, patchwork families, couples without children, and those who work at home in a setup of a ‘home office’. Therefore residential repertoire of architecture should respond to this development with an exploding diversity of planning typologies. Beyond providing flexible layouts, residential architecture today should inevitably respond to a sense of community for various types of living and households. With this aim, the third-year architectural design studio at TED University in Ankara, tested an experimental pedagogical approach to question possible strategies necessary to promote positive interactions between different lifestyles and architectural programs. To address the complexities of a multi-layered and spatially diverse urban program, the studio introduced two key concepts: ‘multiplication’ and ‘variation’. Architectural design strategies of multiplication and variation are utilized as explorative learning methods to shift the top-down design approach into perpetual navigation across scales. This approach entails operating simultaneously at multiple scales, from different types of dwelling units to broader urban-scale planning scenarios. As this method prompts rationalizing and optimizing living spaces, it fosters a networked form of dwelling by negotiating among the individuals, the families, the groups, the neighborhood, the district and city. This paper will present the diverse outcomes of this multiscalar endeavor and discuss future trajectories for the studio’s pedagogical approach.