ARCH 723 is a project base studio course introduces students to advanced topics in the design research with a strong link to architectural representation. This studio course takes on the challenge of designing a traveling exhibition. Using different modes, media and techniques of representation, students are asked to design a space and a display for the reading, understanding, interpreting and finally documenting METU Lodging.
The goal of this exhibition is to promote the production of “new documents” by means of the active involvement of architects, architectural students, historians, theorists and critics. Here we will benefit from the definition of the term “curator” as it is used in art world. “The words etymological roots attest that it “treats”, “cures” art, with its intricate ways”. So does this exhibition as it not only makes architectural documents visible and understandable and treats them as museological objects identified, collected and preserved, but also creates and completes them to construct an archive for the promotion of architectural knowledge. In other words, architectural knowledge will be obtained by the actual making of documents and documentation. This critical act is conceived as a process, rather than an end product. Thus we conceive exhibition as “an instrumental tool” for architectural research. This exhibition should be evaluated as a research initiative and the material collected should be seen as the seed of a “new archive” for emerging research fields. The way we study history and theoretical interpretations of architectural objects and their documentation, contributed to the “expansion” of its disciplinary boundaries. METU Lodging exhibition, on the contrary, particularly focusing on a very specific object of study, “the house”, aims at puling architecture back to its basics. In other words, our documentation does not expand the borders of the architectural production to a necessary social, political and historical context; it rather forms the ground and provides the tools for further contextualization.
Prof.Dr. Ayşen Savaş
Photograph Credentials: Beril Kapusuz Balcı
