Publications

This paper presents the beginnings of my journey into architectural education, presented at Yıldız Technical University Architectural Education Symposium 2007, together with YTU/CADU staff; Ela Çil, Birgül Çolakoğlu, Meral Erdoğan, Fulya Akipek, Oya Pakdil, and Şebnem Yalınay. It includes different exercises from various studio instructors,…

In the 14th century, Albrecht Dürer basically seems to capture some of the fundamentals of contemporary parametric design. Apart from other thinkers of his age, he refused to accept one single definition of beauty, based on proportions. His famous physiognomical studies reflected very early examples…

Below is another cult article written by Robert Aish in 2005; Design has been described as making inspire decisions with incomplete information. True, we may use prior knowledge, we may even think we understand the causalites involved, but what really matters is exploration: of new…

Here is my 2004 Turkish translation of the popular article “Deleuze and the Use of the Genetic Algorithm in Architecture” by Manuel DeLanda in 2001. The computer simulation of evolutionary processes is already a well established technique for the study of biological dynamics. One can unleash…

The exploration of the concept of “patronus – pattern” in architecture is presented in a captivating and insightful manner. This issue of AD, although older, continues to hold relevance in the contemporary realm of architectural design, covering various aspects of the conception and utilization of…

This is an old research paper, prepared with Birgül Çolakoğlu. It is in Turkish and includes our first results in some of the Rhinoscript exercises. Here is the abstract of the paper; Recent research in architecture have focused on to understand computational methods of formal…

One of the cult texts in Shape Grammars theory is Stiny‘s Chinese Ice-ray Lattices Grammars. Although it is full of technical terms, it represents an analysis of a working algorithm. We can directly transfer that from the behavior of an artist. “One can imagine a…

This month became a retrospective for me. This was my first animation, prepared for the CAAD Graduate course of Ahmet Turan Köksal in 2002. It was a funny inspiration from SDF-1 of Robotech. The terminal model is my graduation project at YTU Faculty of Architecture…

Below is a part of Heidegger’s famous text, “The Question Concerning Technology”, on Techne, Epistinio, Poiesis; Revealing “… We are questioning concerning technology, and we have arrived now at Aletheia, at revealing. What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer: everything….

After explaining the beautiful parquet deformations of William Huff, Douglas Hofstadter states his opinions about the algorithmic potentials of those patterns. Although it was 30 years ago, Hofstadter points out a fundamental discussion related to today’s parametric design tools; …for a machine to make simple…

In 2007, we conducted a computational design studio in YTU / CADU with Birgül Çolakoğlu. Below is the brief of the paper published at METU JFA Vol24 issue 2 titled “An Innovative Design Education Approach: Computational Design Teaching For Architecture”. We were dealing with how…

Architectural education in its relation to computational technologies is both becoming a part of these studies and having the potential of renovating itself with the knowledge of emerging technologies. This paper, in this framework, will be presenting a design research studio that aims at developing…

This simple tool, N-Grid resembles John Hejduk and colleagues’ famous design exercise “The Nine-Square Grid”. I developed the tool in 2009 using MaxScript. The nine-square grid is one of the most common kit-of-parts exercises in design studios for over 50 years. To explain briefly, the nine-square grid exercise…

From the 2009 eCAADe paper presented with Birgül Çolakoğlu titled; “Designer as Casual Coder: Overview of an Experimental Design Studio”; In recent years, computational approaches in architecture started to change the scope of the architect’s work. He/she is not any more a passive tool user…

It was the 2008, eCAADe Presentation at Antwerp together with Birgül Çolakoğlu and Serkan Uysal. This paper presents a student work developed in the Introduction to Computational Design graduate course titled “Designing the Design” at Yildiz Technical University. The course focuses on the use of…

Studio exercises are short-term and open-ended design activities that represent a constructivist learning approach by limiting design domains. They are student-centered, model and process-oriented educational tools. These qualities make studio exercises potential tools for integrating contemporary Digital Design thinking into architectural education. This research aims…

Under the dust of 10 years; revisiting my master’s thesis; This paper introduces research about the Computer Aided Instruction (CAI) tool which is based on the master thesis of Tuğrul Yazar from Yıldız Technical University (YTU) Faculty of Architecture Computational Design Graduate Program (BOM). The…

This started as a pragmatist search of the term “Objectile”. I was curious about the real meaning of it, while the famous 1995 works of Bernard Cache were the thing I was looking for as images. I found two things about this word. One of…

Here is an interesting phrase from Jill Larkin and Herbert Simon’s famous article. It is “Why A Diagram (Sometimes) Worth Ten Thousand Words”; The phrase from the article We consider external problem representations of two kinds. Both of which use a set of symbolic expressions…

This is my first try at DesignScript syntax. It is quite easy to understand and on-screen reference help seems to work well. It creates regular AutoCAD entities when you run. One of the most important concepts of this language is said to be a kind…