MEKAN art Space Decoration & Architecture Magazine – Educational Structures as Transforming Spaces

Durmuş Dilekci wrote about how educational buildings could become places in the future under the heading ‘EDUCATIONAL STRUCTURES AS A TRANSFORMER SPACE’ as a reflection of MEKAN art in the May – June – July 2020 issue of the Space Decoration & Architecture Magazine.

Education at the same time, education structures should take responsibilities beyond just being 8 hours a day in 8 months of the year; It must be transformed into structures that transform its immediate surroundings. If there are “transformative spaces” that will cover all age groups of the society and become centers for solving social problems, these structures will become the driving force for cultural and social awareness and awareness within the urban fabric, with the effect of “transforming space” in our neighborhoods with their new mission. These hybridized educational structures; both the school, the cultural center, the family education area, the workshop, the sports area, and the exhibition area, and the potential to be educational spaces for the whole society. Epidemics have changed our long-built environments and social worlds throughout history. At the same time, this new situation should be developed on a philosophy that combines moral, physical and social well-being in every field of society. Human beings will adapt to this process in a 10-year period by being the easiest to adapt to changes throughout history.

‘EDUCATIONAL STRUCTURES AS A TRANSFORMER SPACE’

The flu epidemic at the beginning of the last century killed more than ten million people. In the 19th century alone, 6 cholera epidemics destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives. These outbreaks, which were aggravated by the overcrowding and poor living conditions of the cities, led to the sanatorium movement in Europe and the United States. These institutions, designed to accommodate, treat and isolate patients; He emphasized the need for hygiene, sunlight and fresh air. Before the drug for tuberculosis was developed, its treatment was completely natural and climatic. These clinical environments have been one of the key inspiration for the new modern architecture, along with industrialization and enlightenment. Modernist architecture (the dominant design language from the 1920s to the 1970s) often built it on a set of principles that confirmed the purity of the form, clear geometries, innovative materials and refusal to decorate. These principles provided significant responses to the periods of war, disease and destruction, which defined the first half of the 20th century.

Richard Neutra, who died in 1920 from his father, “influenza”, is known for his efforts to make the sun and natural ventilation usable in all livable areas. At the Corona school in Los Angeles, built in 1935, Neutra achieved the indoor and outdoor continuity by fluently connecting each classroom to the outside gardens and created a pioneering model for outdoor spaces becoming educational spaces. Today, at the point reached, it is proceeding to re-read the last century and to obtain new inferences. However, education system modeling has a multi-component fiction. The architectural physical structure should include an approach that serves and paves the inferences of these components. So how should be this approach ?

Children’s perception of time and space is very different to us … Their lives are fed by wealth beyond space and time constraints. Drawing, running, playing … What they want to do by their nature is the only truth for them. This is a very distant cycle for programmed and restricted lives like us. Children first grasp the world with visual and auditory stimuli. Everything from the rows they touch to the toy they play unwittingly affects their mental development. The images placed by the architecture in the collective memory in the same sense directly shape the children’s world. As a tool that affects all mental and spiritual development of the child, it is important what architecture expresses rather than scale and what children say to the world of perception.

In the last 20 years, experiments about technology-oriented education systems have been carried out. For Turkey, this epidemic period of education, said the new potential coincided with the period related to the alignment. I think that this new situation will mean the collapse of imposed education systems, such as testing through testing, in the process of understanding and understanding. An education system that is structured specifically for new situations and that will be entertained and fond of by having fun and making process will be promised.

The corona virus outbreak destroyed one of the important feet on which the current education system was based, and struck us that it was the truth of a period that had depleted its function. In the near future, we will say hello to a period when the hegemony of international test companies will come to an end and the fact that education is a marketable tool between countries is destroyed. It is evident how even the deep-rooted educational units of these centuries are unprepared to manage this process. Now re-education strategies for children need to be developed; Built on the moral motivation of collective working methods based on design, production, skill, game, sports and entertainment …

Although physical activities are scientifically known to affect academic performance positively, physical mobility in this period has always been suppressed and pushed out of the field of active education as a “thing” that can be done in a certain period of breath or time. Inelastic lessons and lesson hours, exams, reward-based study methodology should now be replaced by a productive, shared, digested, internalized, entertaining educational process. The destruction caused by the restricted and repressed education systems in our children’s memories should be recognized. It must turn into a productive space where classrooms have no walls and flexible space definitions.

At the same time, educational structures should take responsibilities beyond just being 8 hours a day in 8 months of the year; It must be transformed into structures that transform its immediate surroundings. If there are “transformative spaces” that will cover all age groups of the society and become centers for solving social problems, these structures will become the driving force for cultural and social awareness and awareness within the urban fabric, with the effect of “transforming space” in our neighborhoods with their new mission. These hybridized educational structures; both the school, the cultural center, the family education area, the workshop, the sports area, and the exhibition area, and the potential to be educational spaces for the whole society. Epidemics have changed our long-built environments and social worlds throughout history. At the same time, this new situation should be developed on a philosophy that combines moral, physical and social well-being in every field of society. Human beings will adapt to this process in a 10-year period by being the easiest to adapt to changes throughout history.

You can access the article on pages 104 and 105 of the journal. You can also click on the title of the article to read the entire magazine, or access it at https://www.artimekan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/MEKAN80-dgtl.pdf .