Comprehension of place and ways of its participation to architectural design

From the 1960's onwards, it can be seen that the concept of 'place' is presented as a new means of thinking and expression as a critique of the human-independent concept of geometric and abstract 'space,' which is based on the measurable Cartesian tradition. The notion of 'place,' conceptualized as a qualitative, holistic and multi-layered phenomenon, refers to approaching the world as a condition of existence with an emphasis on meaning, experience, perception, and body in the space-human interaction focus. In this sense, it has created a breakpoint via enabling re-interrogation of the relation of space with existence, life and human experiences which were forgotten with modern architecture. The trigger of this breakpoint was the phenomenological studies of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, which also addressed the space at the existential level. For this reason, 'place'-focused theories that are originating from the phenomenological path that points to experience as a source of knowledge and meaning, suggest that a qualified and deep understanding of place can be acquired through experience. Also, they point out this experience as a fundamental source for architectural design as 'place-making' activity. However, nowadays, with the spread of transportation, communication and information tools, the interaction with remote places is increasing. Cities are getting included in the global network flows, and become accessible anytime and anywhere. Architecture, which becomes more and more integrated into the global economy, is transforming into a non-local scale practice. In such an environment, the experience of 'place' which is expressed as the basis for the architectural design process, is less and less effective in architectural design, and in some cases, it is completely out of the process. Such phenomenon can be exemplified by national and international architectural offices and architectural design competitions that are becoming widespread. It is aimed at the thesis to investigate how places are being comprehended and participate in the architectural design process today with all these developments. Following the Introduction, the next section of the thesis studies 'place' approaches that are shaped around various conceptual focuses in phenomenology, human geography, and architecture literature, and their common point of place-human interaction is addressed through bodily experience. At the end of the section, in order to describe the concept of 'place' adopted in the thesis study, an evaluation of these theories along with opposing views and alternative approaches to abstract space concept is given. The third section focuses on the role of 'place' in architectural design and its activity in the process. Accordingly, as described theoretically in the second section, 'place' that exists and constantly reproduced through living and human experiences, so that it becomes unthinkable as something that can be designed independently from this livelihood. For this reason, it cannot be included in architectural design practice, which is carried out with a series of abstractions; thus in the process, it appears either as a pre-design source or as a potentiality to find reality after design and construction. This thesis studies the comprehension of place and its involvement in the design process, focusing on its design-source condition, and the relationship that architects/designers establish with the place is studied through the bodily experience which is the mediator of the human-place interaction. The bodily experience that is described by means of time-space-body-perception analysis is addressed on a scale that expresses the contact or inversely the distance to the place. According to this, in the process of architectural design, which is gradually becoming a non-local practice with the recent developments, experiential contact with the place is moving away from the 'intensive experience,' happens mostly in the 'limited experience' range and gradually getting closer to 'remote access.' In the fourth section, it is tried to be traced how the place is understood in the 'remote access' through an educational case study. For this, an architectural school diploma project studied in a distant field that was not experienced bodily was monitored, and personal interviews were held with students on their design experiences. Interviews which aim at understanding personal experiences of each designer via open-ended questions were examined through 'thematic analysis.' A model proposal has been developed to explain the relationship between the emerging themes and components in the process and their relationship to each other. Accordingly, in the case of remote access which refers to non-presence at the site, information that can be accessed through various tools/mediums, is used instead of the knowledge built by physical experience. In contrast to the holistic knowledge built up by the body's multi-sensory and simultaneous perception, comprehension of the place built on the tools/mediums that appeal to different senses and are accessed in different formats, consist of the superimposition of partial and fragmented data and information necessarily compiled from 'outside.' Thus, a series of difficulties arise in the process. Access channels, lists, scope and constraints of the tools/mediums that leads the process, together with the difficulties encountered in the process, are also included in the subsections. The findings of the case study, general evaluations on the thesis study, and some suggestions about the comprehension of place in architecture are discussed in the conclusion section.