A discussion on the reflections of digital design discourses in the design studio

The approaches of "what" and "how" questions in architecture is constantly updating due to changes in the axis of technology in the dicipline. The main reason of this update can be explained with the influence of new tools and technology on architectural design, production ways and also, with the triggering effect of this technology on new ways of thinking and therefore as a result, design culture. Rather than the technical capacitites of the digital environment, the direction of architecture depends on these new ways of thinking which is triggered by digital. In the new era, the new quest and the dream of architecture will come along with these new thinking systems. This thesis, considers digital as the triggering reason for the " new thinking systems", which is necessesary for searching new environments and dreams. Therefore, thesis shaped upon the aforementioned capacity of the digital. In architecture what to design and how to design is not irrelevant with production and the design culture. Every single production within the architectural design environment, reveals the possibilities in digital and give us the opportunity to set arguments on the new potentials of architecture. Mentioned production regarding architecture, forms the future thinking of architectual design and architectural discourse alongside of architectural object. Architectural discourse carry the potential of determining "what to produce today" by associating with the act of creating.Thesis defends, the quest and the potential of the architecture, thrive with the discourse and focuses on the interaction between discourses of digital and architectural design environment. It is necessary for the thesis to figure out this interaction in order to obtain the necessary conditions of the architectural design. Because the aim of the thesis is not to understand the technology or the digital equipments which creates the new form of environments, but to understand the context and the discourse which allows to create a brand new architecture. Thesis will firstly analyze how the architectural design environment has changed under the affect of digital and it will analyze the new evolution that digital brought in tectonic context, additionaly thesis will examine the breaking point that are able to define the improvement way of architecture, which is named as digital thresholds. From these thresholds, Paperless Studio which is an alternative design studio, developed by Tschumi at Columbia University in 1992, is an important breaking point for the thesis since it is an indication of changes in design process under the influence of digital will affect not only architectural practice but also studio production. In addition, the importance of Paperless Studio for the thesis is that the studio has responded to the effect of the digital in the architectural design more quickly than the practice and the reflections of the new design thinking triggered by digital are more visible in the design studio compare to the practice. In this respect, the studios were seen as potential areas to make visible the endless possibilities of the future of architecture in relation to the digital design discourses and to try how these new thinking systems of design will lead to architecture and therefore studios is considered as worth to be examined. In the third part of the thesis the interaction between digitally effected architectural discourse and the production in architectural design will be questioned and discourse-architectural design- studio interaction will be examined. Here, production in the architectural design should not be considered only as the production of the object of architecture, any kind of production regarding architectural design and discourse should be considered. Therefore, the production in the architectural design now includes architectural design thinking and discourse, so it can be said that design studio production constitutes the main frame of architectural thinking, understanding and doing and by doing so it nurtures the production in architectural design and reveals new approaches to architecture. Hence, studio production, as an experimental production and research area of architecture, cannot be considered independent from the interaction between production in architectural design and discourse. In fact, it can be said that this interaction felt much more dominant than the design studio compared to architectural practice, since studio production does not have to have a physical reality on a one-to-one scale and therefore allows experimental production. Based on this effect in the thesis, studio production, as the backbone of architectural education, will be handled from two angles, from the capacity of affecting the discourse and from the capacity of getting the affected by the discourse. For thesis, studio production is the consistently search and imagination for the new, the other, innovative and the experimental. The studio is a test area which discuss what architecture and architects can do, not what architecture is or what architects have done. It is considered that, studio production's main aim is to discover new potentials of architecture and to experiment on the infinite possibilities of the future of architecture. Therefore, the studio, as the action and process of creation, can be seen both as a trigger and as a result of the architectural design. In this respect, thesis will focus on the reflections of digital discourses on architectural design studios and these reflections will be examined upon the selected studios. Within the scope of the thesis, interaction between the digital discourses and the studios will be examined through the selected studios which are experimental about digital design and which have exceptional methods/specifications therefore new potantials for the architectural design process. Studios will be examined through the actors who contribute to the discourses of the digital. The reason why the thesis is based on the actors is that the actors are seen as information transmitters between practice and design studio. In order to observe the transfer of information between studio and practice, thesis will focus on the studio production of an actor (architect) who was effective in practice or discourse and the reflections of discourses on studio approaches will be examined. For this aim, five project studios are selected from University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan from the years 2014-2016. The selected studios are the studios of Cecil Balmond, Nanako Umemoto, Sulan Kolatan, Hina Jamelle and Ali Rahim + Ferda Kolatan + Peter Trummer. The writer has personally observed these projects or involved in these projects directly as a student/research assistant. Within the scope of the thesis, the design approaches that are thought to be developed under the influence of discourse will be examined through the 'description' and design methods in the studio process, and the tectonics of the works produced in accordance with the studio description and method will be examined. Here, description does not imply whole set of rules that should be followed step by step, but should be seen as an attempt to search for new ways of working with the discipline of architecture and to discover new possibilities for design methods. In order to understand the conditions which has created the actor's design approaches, writer has examined the studios in their own design context. The main point emphasized by the thesis is to look at the architecture produced by digital methods, not only in terms of process and technology, but also the context that makes these productions possible, and thus to see the reflections of digital design discourses on the studio environment, emphasizing the experimentality of the studio. One reason for the difference in the design methods of actors in selected studios is how the actors deal with and interpret information, because the inclusion of information in architectural design process has required a re-examination of the design methodology and process and the way in which information is used in architectural design has become a design question in itself. In this respect, the studios examined will look at how the way in which information is used in relation to digital discourse shapes the approaches to design and these design approaches will be examined through tectonics of projects. The use of knowledge in design, along with the process starting from the Animate Form, shifted the emphasis on design from the discourse of architectural object to the field of architecture (object to fields), but then, with the re-incorporation of aesthetics into architectural discourses, approaches that attach importance to how architecture looks and not how it works has returned the emphasis from the field to architectural objects (fields to objects) again. Thus, by examining the way in which information is used, a relationship with context has been established in this respect in addition to the design approaches of the actors. The change in emphasis is analyzed with the help of concepts, studio description/method and works produced in the process according to the studio method. Thesis's aimis not to give a declaration on the future of architecture, aim is to draw focus on the design approach and the process production. Thus, it is aimed to discover the potentials in design methods and studio descriptions and to create a new source of information from the relationship between discourse-design process-result product for architecture. Discussion on the five studios examined made at the final part of the fourth chapter of thesis. The aim here is not to praise a studio method or to accept a studio method as gospel, but to show the differences of studios and discover the potentials in the design methods and descriptions. Accordingly, it is necessary to know that the goals of the studios are different from each other. Each studio should be evaluated only in the studio-specific concepts and context and the result should not be seen as successful or unsuccessful by just looking at the final product. As the studios examined have been conducted between the years 2014-2016, most of the studios do not interfere with the time period in which the discourse and context occurred and the time period in which the studios were conducted. Therefore, although the effects of the context are felt to a large extent, changes in the design approaches of these actors have been observed. In this section, all studio processes and recipes are re-viewed through a set of concepts and the whole system has been interpreted through these concepts. Selected concepts are topography, program, form, interior space and atmosphere. In the final part of the thesis, with the acception that studio is an experimantal environment, architectural concepts and new on the agenda approaches/ researches triggered by the production in the experimental architectural design will be discussed. In this respect, new structuralism, new materialism and Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) will be discussed and the effects of these approaches on the architectural discipline will be examined. Thesis do not aim to conclude such issues like " what is architecture today ? " or "what should architecture be like or look like?". Aim is to see how digital affects architecture as a design method and idea and additionally, to look at the interaction between discourse and studio process, to produce a base for today's design research, and thus to discuss how architecture can be approached with today's context. In this study, it is thought that the production in the studios examined will make new potentials of the future of architecture visible and will contribute to the discipline of architecture with the knowledge produced by the design process in the studio environment in and epistemologic way. In the studios examined, the approaches that affect the design thinking and that make visible of how new places can be, have the potential to shape the expectations from architecture by establishing new forms of relationship with architecture. These studios are not indicators of the dominant or single approach developed in their contexts of design, but these studios and the new spaces that emerged in the studio process give an idea of how the architectural design process can be dealt with, not just how architecture might look. Under the influence of new approaches to discourse and design, the experimental fields and architecture practice of architecture, including the studios, will shift to new opportunities, new definitions of what architecture is and how to think architecture, will be updated every time and new forms of relationship with architecture will establish each time.