First-Year Architectural Design Studio in Action: Insights from the ‘Timberscapes' Design-Build Experience

The "Design-Build" approach in design studios emphasizes hands-on learning and 1:1 scale production in dynamic environments that encourage teamwork, material understanding, bodily awareness, and collaborative decision-making. This study presents a design-build experience titled “Timberscapes” for the final project in the "Design Studies" studio during the Spring semester of the 2021-22 academic year at Bahçeşehir University, Architecture Department. The project explored collaborative design interventions in the campus's limited open spaces. Over five weeks, students identified campus needs through personal experiences and developed spatial proposals in teams. Three projects were selected involving student participation for different campus locations. In the second phase, due to the unavailability of conditions for their implementation, the projects were further developed with new divisions of labor and expert consultations. The studio problem emphasized dialogue and negotiation in team-based processes, structured in two stages with changing teams and responsibilities for students. This paper presents the experimental studio process and student outputs, and investigates its contributions for the students. The method involves a literature review of past experiences with design-build method, the pedagogy of teamwork in the design studio, potentials of timber as a sustainable material to be flexibly used in architectural education and presents the current experience as a staged case study. The paper discusses the case study’s gains in creating a dynamic negotiation environment in the first-year architectural design studio, and highlights the practical limitations and future implications of the applied process.