A Design Task for Sivas Grand Mosque’s Minaret: Vertical Construction/Formal Articulation/Visual Stimuli

Abstract

As well as a design process, experimental practices in architectural education are associated with the analytical approaches of visual thinking and visual reasoning. The main purpose of this study was to explore creative methods for devising a vertical construction through visual reasoning. In terms of experimental practices, design research is based on exploration while the primary research area in architecture is reframed by constantly renewed approaches. Accordingly, the hypothesis of this study was that creative methods would improve when the creation of a vertical construction in architectural education is nourished by visual stimuli. The study searched for a construction that plasticized the vertical spatiality of Sivas Grand Mosque’s minaret. The method was shaped by a prerequisite dialogue that rests on visual stimuli. The expected outcome of this dialogue was that the minaret as a pure form would be subjected to an abstraction and, a design proposal then developed for its current structural problems. The results indicated a two-fold appreciation of design. First, when the minaret was maintained within the idea of stabilization rather than being construed as a pure form, the search for a creative method of vertical construction was handled in the context of static preservation. Second, when Sivas Grand Mosque’s minaret as an imaginary design tool was construed as a pure form and the abstraction level increased through visual reasoning, the outcomes gradually demonstrated an approach akin to experimental practices