Investigation of Architecture Students' Opinions About Architecture School Buildings

The most important period of architectural education is the first year that students from a different education system spend at the faculty of architecture and meet the profession. Students who try to establish a relationship between the educational approach they meet in the first year of the school and the building where the education is given, mostly consider the school buildings as an exemplary building. The reason for this evaluation is that they have not yet met with architectural education and that they do not have sufficient architectural repertoire. On the other hand, this ignorance contains important information to reveal their impartial and unconditioned perceptions and evaluations. In this study, the effect of first-year basic design education on making sense of the built environment is questioned, and in this context, the opinions of first-year architecture students about school buildings are investigated. In the study conducted with the first-year students of Dokuz Eylül University Faculty of Architecture, qualitative and quantitative research methods were used together and the perceptions of the students who received and did not receive basic design education were evaluated with the semantic differentiation scale. In addition to the semantic differentiation scale, which is recommended in perception studies in the literature and gives quantitative results, evaluation techniques consisting of open-ended questions were also used to control the findings. The results of the study revealed that first-year basic design education is effective in students' perception of the built environment. Choosing the architecture school building, where architectural education is given as an example of the built environment, is very important in terms of allowing students to experience the building and to seek concrete equivalents of the knowledge they have learned through education in the building.