The City as a Studio: Architectural Education Through Bodily Experience

Abstract

Architectural knowledge has a dynamic character and can be discovered collectively during architectural education. The place of this discovery and production process can be considered as the “studio” and this studio doesn’t have to be limited in a building. To extend the limits of the studio to city scale creates new opportunities both for the students and the locals. Visiting different parts of the city and converting those places into a studio triggers encounters. Every encounter is a creative and productive act. As a course of its nature, the city is the place of confrontations and encounters. Being, producing and discussing in the city creates an atmosphere where intellectual, imaginative and creative encounters emerge. This emergence can be considered as a flashmob. Flash-mobs demonstrate the power of bodily experience and highlights the importance of performativity. Each student constructs a mental and muscle memory by his/her own bodily experience during the studio hours in the city. This experience let us to create an extra curriculum such as historical, socioeconomical, natural and cultural aspects and everyday life practices of the place. In this paper, I would like to discuss my way of teaching as a retroactive research. I prefer to use the city – Istanbul – as a studio and visit different parts of it for my courses. In this way, an architectural course turns into a retroactive research based on bodily experience. Each event of perception opens up to its own world and the world of perception is merged with the real world itself. When you use the city as a studio, the dynamic character of architectural knowledge unfolds itself and extends its content. In this critical pedagogy, architectural education becomes interactive between the city users and the students and transforms both of them.