Simulated architecture and its impacts on education

The Case of Turkey

Abstract

The contemporary phase of modernity developed after the Second World War is based on the technological progress. The new technology has been the dominant factor for transforming man's life redefining the concepts of knowledge, space, time, materiality, reality, community, identity, culture and art. It affected the limits of the body and mind offering a new mode of materiality and spatiality. New representation techniques such as virtual reality and cyberspace, global communication networks, circulation of information worldwide influenced the architectural practise and gradually its education. Recent projects and the outcomes of the design studios in various architectural schools show that contemporary architecture obeys to the new technology. Architects seemed to have become obsesses with images and image –making by the possibilities of the computer technology and digital world. Architecture as the historical profession of ‘place making' in relation to human senses and body is seems to engage itself to invent new complex spatial and surface forms by challenging the old tools of architecture. As a result, computer technology is widely used in practice and education regardless of the local characteristics. Major schools of architecture in Turkey promote uses of digital design schemes for the name of being contemporary. This in turn creates a dependency on digitally produced design schemes and projects. The worldly experiences of space, awareness of traditional architecture and local environment has weakened. On the contrary it dictated students of architecture to see the design in terms of digitally produced visual representations. This paper will discuss the impact of digital representation techniques in the architectural design education in Turkey. The outcomes of this research encourage the author to argue that architectural education should be based on the man's world of lived experiences, of sensations, of perceptions and of needs rather than on hallucinations. It seems vital that architectural education needs to revise its task, objectives and responsibilities before the seductive digital, virtual environment replaces the worldly environment which is the original in which architecture was formed.