Jessica Shi
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Jessica Shi, an architecture student from Rice University. I will be your host today.

This fall we are presenting highlights from short conversations with professionals about what constitutes as beautiful in their line of work. We gathered really cool stories and experiences that are not only inspiring but also informative about the kind of projects they work on. You’ll hear what our speakers value most and what excites them about their projects. So, join us as we embark on sharing our curiosity for how individuals define beauty in their fields, where they encounter it, and how it shapes their practices.

In this episode, our guest is Kerim Miskavi, the founder of MAS Architecture Studio in Istanbul.

Kerim earned his architecture degree from Rice University and started his private practice seven years ago. In 2022 his firm won a national competition for a university campus project in Turkey. It is the new campus for the Izmir School of Economics. He is currently designing the architecture school for it, which is kind of a dream job for any architect!

Before diving into how he defined beauty, we first asked if beauty was presented as something to aim for during his college education.

Kerim Miskavi
I think that’s a good question. Yes, it was definitely one of the parameters for our education. I think some of our professors were more explicit about it. And we had one professor who would always come in before the jury last night and say, don’t worry about it, just make it beautiful. So, so it’s definitely something you think about a lot.

Of course, in terms of the education for architecture, a lot of it is just getting the framework and the conceptual approach and understanding how to solve the puzzle of the project. But at the end of the day, it always has to be beautiful, right? Because that’s the world we deal with.

I think of it as very similar to cooking, in a way. You have to choose your ingredients. And you have to know the techniques right, you have to cook things correctly, and make sure everything is done properly in terms of technique. But at the end of the day, it has to taste good, right? And even if it’s technically executed perfectly, if it doesn’t taste good, if it doesn’t inspire you, then you’re left with a dish that you will never remember. So, I think that’s what beauty is, to what we do. I mean, all the things we have to get right technically is always there. But at the end of the day also has to be beautiful to evoke the emotions that we like to aim for as architects.

Jessica
Listen to how Kerim defines many layers of beauty when he is viewing projects.

Kerim
As you work on something, there’s a couple of layers of beautiful, I think. The first level of beauty is maybe, let’s say, a more shallow understanding of it. You look at something, you think it looks nice and you say, hey, wow, that’s beautiful. And I think we all have that response, right? Whether we are trained for it or not, we all look for beauty, whether it’s in buildings, or anything around us. And that’s a very valid response, I think. But when you start practicing, and when you start creating things, as you sort of move through, you start finding beauty in other things as well. Like little moments or details or discoveries that you yourself notice or you come across as you’re designing. Then those are maybe the moments where I’m like, oh, wow, I never thought it would turn out this way but the way the stair ended up being in the space is beautiful, or the way the light hits this little hallway is very beautiful, and I never thought it was going to be this way. So, I think as you sort of get a more trained eye, you start to get us a finer grain of beauty that you discover. And that’s, I think, quite rewarding.

Jessica
Getting a trained eye takes time. How does one develop the criteria to ensure the designs are well received? Is it by always by being mindful of or incorporating certain elements?

Kerim
I think it’s a tough question. It’s a good question as well. I think it’s sort of the process of looking at a lot of things, training your eye, finding things that you like, and then sort of building a library of things that you think are beautiful. And you always have that in the back of your head as sort of reference for things you go back to when you’re doing design as well. But then there comes a moment where you kind of internalize all of that, and you, in a way, you forget about them. And you sort of unlearn everything, and it just becomes a more intuitive process for you. And then it’s almost like you’re the spectator, or you’re discovering things that was done by someone else that you find, as you’re working through your process and you’re like, aha, that’s it. That’s what I’m looking for.

A lot of our work, I think, personally, a lot of my process has to do with this kind of learning and unlearning to find beauty, because maybe it’s also my personality but I like to approach projects in a very logical way. I mean, usually, we’re given a pretty specific brief, we’re given a specific site, we’re given specific parameters, we work with engineers, and everything is quite rigorous in terms of its overall technical expectation. So, you start by solving the puzzle. And you look at things like order, symmetry, rhythm, structure, space, proportion, and all of these basic things as you’re designing the space. But I think there comes a time, it’s almost like when it was analyzed, I think I read this somewhere, there was research on what is beauty in people’s faces. There was kind of correlation between the symmetry of someone’s face, but the symmetry has to be just the right amount. If it’s too symmetrical, then it becomes kind of difficult for someone to register, it becomes too rigid. But then if it’s too asymmetrical, then it also doesn’t involve this kind of beauty. So, it has to be just the right amount of balance between symmetry and authenticity or originality to get that sweet spot, right. And I think that’s what we do a lot as well or I do a lot in my practice. Once you get all the basics and you have a sense of the order and the symmetry then we go back and try to make it more human in a way. Like, introduce some idiosyncrasies to it or specific moments that feel that are unique in it, that create a sense of surprise or the unexpected, so that it feels more personal. Because I think if you go about, it in a very sort of engineering state of mind, then you end up with something that makes a lot of sense, but maybe doesn’t invoke the kind of authenticity or the uniqueness that you’re looking for when you’re looking for that sense of beauty. I don’t know if that makes sense. But I feel like there has to be a place where there’s like, the rule is broken, and something happens. And that’s when you kind of wake up to it. And you say, Oh, wow, that’s beautiful.

Jessica
Is there an interplay with beauty and order, beyond the balance, symmetry, uniqueness that Kerim already brough up?

Kerim
Maybe it’s also a generational thing, I think what we consider to be beautiful, both in architecture but also in the world, changes a lot over time. If you look at the classical sense of beauty, it was all about order and composition and harmony, right? So, the consistency of the rules that were applied and the proportions of the spaces or the designs were indeed the perfect measure of beauty. And the rules were followed very strictly like in the Roman architecture, or Greek architecture, if you look at all these classical examples, you see that they’re always striving for the perfect order, and trying to reinvent the order, but with small steps to find the perfect beauty in it. But I think, now we have moved to a time where perfect order and perfect balance, we know, doesn’t quite exist in the world. Things are a bit more messy. We are not all homogenous. And the beauty arises from there, the sort of idiosyncratic moments that arise in a sort of inherent order. But if everything is the same, then we don’t think it’s what we are looking for in terms of beauty. Because that’s now starting to feel like it’s too, too dogmatic or too classical or too monotonous. So now we perceive beauty differently as well, I would say.

It’s a balancing act, because I mean, you have classical approach on one side and then you have the postmodern approach on the other side, where postmodern approach says, you know, everything is its own thing, and they don’t have to talk to each other, there doesn’t need to be a specific binding order to anything because everything is different. But I think we’ve also moved past that, in a way. So, what I’m usually looking for is this inherent sense of order in the classical sense, but then moments where that order breaks down to create something unique.

Jessica
Where does architecture fit among the current art trends where the artists appear to focus mostly on making social statements?

Kerim
I think for artists it’s easier to take a critical position and say, you know what, what I’m going to create does not have to be beautiful, because that’s not the effect I’m going for. I’m actually trying to take a position, whether it’s nihilist or whether it’s critical, or whether you’re trying to evoke a different kind of feeling, I think that’s something you can do. And I think it’s worth doing, I think it has a lot to say about how that artist currently views the world as well. Maybe they say, you know, while the world isn’t a beautiful place, or we’ve had already a proliferation of beautiful things, and they just get commoditized. So that’s not really what I’m shooting for as an artist.

I think architecture has a bit of that too. But I, I think myself I’m inherently an optimist. I feel like the work we do needs to make the world a better place. And nobody wants to, or I don’t think a lot of people would want to spend millions and millions of dollars on a building for it to be something that’s just purely critical of something, right? So, I think there’s this kind of enhanced optimism in our profession, an idealism maybe in a way to say, well, if we’re going to do something, it needs to be beautiful for it to be worthwhile and for it to stand in the public ground. So yeah, I think for our work, it’s a bit more difficult to take that kind of purely critical stance than some of the current art trends that we see a lot.

It seems like beauty is not something we talk a lot about anymore. We like criticizing things, we like to talk about things that we don’t like that we like changed, but it’s nice to put all the optimist glasses and talk about things like beauty and what does it mean and try to see if there’s a common thread in that because it seems like the common threads are becoming rarer and rarer nowadays as well.

Jessica
We asked Kerim if there is something about his work or field that he wishes more people knew about that may not be visible generally.

Kerim
Yes, for sure. I think for me, one of the most rewarding parts of my work or my profession is the process. So, it’s the process of designing. That to meet a lot of times is maybe more rewarding or more interesting than the outcome itself.

When we design buildings, and they get realized a lot of the times what you see is the final results. But how you got there, what steps you went through, all the sort of lineage of the project from its beginning to the end and all the 1000 steps that are taken, all the decisions that were taken and retaken, and reevaluated and reconsidered, I think make a huge part of how the project came to be. And I think if there was a way to make that more visible or more understandable, then I think similar to art, right? When you look at a piece of art, you look at something and you see the result, but there’s always a story or a technique or framework behind it. And once you understand that, then all of a sudden you look at it differently and you then begin to evaluate or respond to the end result in a different way as well. So, I think if there was a way to get that process to be more part of understanding the outcome, that would be something that would be very beneficial for everyone.

Jessica
As an architecture student, I can definitely relate to how Kerim values the process of designing.

Lastly, a lot of people who haven’t gone to architecture school may think architects as solo workers, but in reality, it appears to involve a lot of teamwork. As we wrap up our episode, Kerim sheds light on this myth.

Kerim
There’s definitely more solo aspect to it. I think design is a very internally oriented practice. You always have to kind of step into yourself and think things through as your own. But I think even from school, you understand that a lot of it has to do with communicating what you have in mind as a designer, whether it’s to your client, whether it’s to your teammate, whether it’s to the other colleagues that you’re working on the same project with, so a lot of it is already from the beginning, based on communication.

And after school, when you start working, then that’s immediately when I stepped into a pretty collaborative practice, where we were always working as a team, even the heads of the studios were designers themselves, so we were working on the designs together. So, I learned that design is not a solo enterprise. It can be but it doesn’t need to be and I think if you work with a team, or with people, from which you have a common language, and you can bounce off ideas, and you can talk through designs, then usually the outcome is very different, and probably much better than what you would end up with, if you are working on it yourself.

[Music]

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