Designography is basically the research area of architecture for [designing the design act] during the design process.
The projects and the buildings specified here are the ones that occured according to the activities defined during the design process. Through the idea of “designing the design act”, we handle and practice the design of design process as a research area.
All the projects are the results of;
- Research of the activities and production methods that compose the design process,
- Writing the design program over the initially given program and making the “relations design” before creating the plan solutions and the images of the building,
- Defining the relation and organizing the process by means of the activities which orientate and reference the production,
- Activities and their functions in orientating the design,
- Activities created or revealed within the actuality of the “work”,
- Research, investigation and creation of the systematics that exist in daily life of architectural design,
- Defining the transitions between the processes and the stages by means of activities and making a research about the effect of each act on the whole,
Specific “relations” are constituted by diagrams between the elements, which compose the design, and these are orientated by acts. As each element is shaped according to its own requirements of functional and technical demands and dimensions, they are connected to each other by “relations”. Different parts are related to each other by means of classification-grouping, putting side by side, dimensioning, rotating, sliding, making famous, making a part of another, layering, folding, joining, superimposing, moving to the background, increasing the background, intersecting, completing, dividing, surrounding, framing, contracting, expanding etc…These acts are, at the same time, used for editing the whole and orientating it during the process. The relation, which is constituted by diagram, is the modulator and acts as the common denominator of the contractions and expansions in the process. The design of the relations by means of activities dissolves the manual world (which depends on the architect’s hand) and constitutes different reference systems.
We name this area of research as “designography of architecture”. “Designography of architecture”, similar to cinematography and choreography, is an area of research related to the way that goes towards the building and space by the creation of production systematics and methods via design acts. The target is, investigating the knowledge that comes out from the production acts of architectural design, like cadence and crescendos in music, developing the architectural design’s crescendos peculiar to itself, utilization and application of this knowledge in project basis, by passing through sharable, flexible, freeing, systematic and clear architectural design, production and construction processes. According to our experience, the systematic of the references followed up in these processes, at the same time, shows its effect from the employer to the engineers and to the workman that makes the construction. Different from the building design understandings, where architect is dominant throughout the whole process, here , architect is the designer of a flexible system.