Other(s) at the Threshold of Architectural Education: a Reading of the Graduation Projects Submitted To the Archiprix Turkey Competition From 2013 To 2020

Abstract

The final architectural design studio, mainly known as the diploma/graduation studio, is a threshold before graduation. Students’ graduation projects are the capstone/assemblage/synthesis of their education life. They might also portray an institution's expected graduate profiles. Prior research mapped the habitus/practices, thus in-between mediation activities (methods, processes, and execution) of diploma studios across European Schools of Architecture but has not explored how this habitus affects and influences students’ outputs. To close this gap, this study capitalizes on previous research's categorizing of studio practices to analyze 1531 Archiprix Turkey competition entries and 61 winners from 2014 to 2020. The study code competition entries into university and hometown categories, studio model categories, prize categories, and winning projects based on school assignment strategies for theme/topic/project areas. The coding is then visualized for analysis. The study analyzes the jury comments on winning projects to reveal the correlation between studio practices and jury evaluations. The results indicate that graduates from certain schools, mostly located in İstanbul, Ankara, and İzmir, tend to participate in the competition more often than graduates from other schools. Thus, other(s) geographies/schools are absent from the scene of architectural education in Turkey. The main diploma studio practice consists of assigning building programs and predetermined project areas. Despite this, new niche practices, such as those focused on speculative approaches and requiring students to determine both the location of their project and its architectural or urban program have emerged in recent years and are showing up in competition results.