SENA KAYASÜ (ARCH/IV)
sena.kayasu@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Welcome back! It’s been a long and eventful summer, but now we’ve returned, even if it’s for the last time (which it is for me). This is my fifth and—please don’t misunderstand, but finally—last year at Bilkent. It’s been a great 18 years since I started kindergarten and worked my way through the various levels of this school, and I’m ready to drive off into the sunset.
Seeing as how I’m closer to graduating as an architect, I figured that there should probably be a little bit more about architecture in this column. It’s supposed to be my area of expertise, after all. I still have a lot to learn, which is why I’ve refrained from commenting too much up to this point, but now I think I can use this space to answer some general questions I’ve encountered over the past three years from those outside the profession.
This change in my attitude was, in part, inspired by my summer internship. A great many things that went on in the office where I worked had little to do with the more idealistic vision we are given in school. I’m sure this is more or less the case in most firms. But one aspect that is congruous between the academic and professional environments is the juries.
Architecture students have juries. These are a form of assessment specialized for design students. For all Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture departments (except maybe the Department of Fine Arts; it’s very independent and mysterious), the most important part of any given semester’s curriculum is the core design studio course. There are always eight design studios, each of which is a prerequisite for the next, so everyone has to study for a minimum of eight semesters. The main assessment type in these courses, or rather, this course—since it’s a unifying element in this form of education—is a jury. The student works on a design based on a given prompt (for instance, “design a guesthouse on the seaside”) and studies the possibilities for months to plan out a building that not only works but is interesting or innovative. They then have to get up in front of a jury of three to five professors to defend it. These professors may or may not be from Bilkent. The student may never have met them before. The instructor of the design course will be on the jury, but for the sake of the ritual, will refrain from commenting. The idea is that the work, though it may have been guided by light touches, is the student’s own, and he or she must stand their ground without assistance or—at least preferably—hindrance from their own instructor.
The worst thing you can do in front of a jury is blame someone else when your work gets criticized. The jury is pushing you, grilling you, they hate your project, and in a moment of panic, in a flurry of adrenaline, you say, “But she told me to do that.” You’re done. The fact is that it’s the jury’s job to grill you. They are there to criticize you because the whole point is that your work must be able to stand up to that. It has to be defendable. So a jury is an exercise in public speaking and verbal expression, assuming that you didn’t make a complete mess of your project. I doubt that the jury members hate your project and hate you and hate the sight of your face and the sound of your voice and everything you may possibly do for all time. No. They are there to push you to stand up for yourself and your decisions. This is what you will have to do for the rest of your life. It is the most crucial part of your education, other than actually learning how to make defendable designs. Even if you miss that bit, though, you’ll start to figure it out on your own after a couple of heated juries.
My parents are both design instructors, so this type of conversation has been going on around the dinner table as far back as I can remember. I still didn’t expect it to be as literal as I discovered it to be over the past summer.
I attended a client meeting at the firm I was interning in. I can’t name the clients or the project. I will only disclose that it was for a very large—gigantic—commercial complex near an industrial district in Ankara. Our firm presented a “concept project”: the initial overview and ideas they had for the site.
The meeting was a jury in disguise. The project manager had to be a lot more pleasant than a student would, since clients are in no way required to have the good will and educational goals harbored by instructors. He had to lead and manipulate. He did this by convincing, conceding, coaxing and standing his ground all at the same time. The speed with which he did it was dizzying. At one point, the client grabbed the laser pointer. I think the ideas he started throwing out may have been a ruse to get a chance with the pointer. Although he was hiring the architect for his expertise, the client badly wanted to exert control over the situation and questioned every decision, his doubts sugarcoated by professional courtesy. The architect’s performance was one of balance. That is the difficulty of architecture: since buildings are all around us, everyone assumes they know about them. Here, too, many of the finer considerations—as well as many of the coarser ones, for instance, how far onto the sidewalk they can build—are ignored. What took place at the meeting was hard to watch.
But the meeting also reminded me why I love architecture. First, if you trust your decisions as you should, the defense and presentation of them can be very satisfying. Secondly, and more importantly, I know that I will soon see ads for and news of the building whose conception I participated in. I knew about it as an idea, and I will see it as a physical reality, occupied by people. Everyone asks me why I transferred out of Molecular Biology: was it terrible? Not by any means. I love science. One day, one of my friends from that department will find a cure for cancer or obesity or something, which will change lives in a way I never could. I simply discovered the satisfaction of seeing pure imagination translated into material. Into life.