Cuckoo’s Campus is a design project for Istanbul Tech-
nical University campus, trying to find solutions for both the education system and the campus life in universities. The paradigm is a transition from teaching based education to learning based education, where the hierarchy between students and professors should be broken down. The paradigm of education today combines formal and informal methods as a means of dynamic versatile discovery. Therefore, Cuckoo’s Campus should have a new identity, leading with a network system combining faculties from different disciplines, techno parks and research and development facilities. Cuckoo’s Campus offers a new critical idea, called ‘Creative Destruction’, for the existing buildings which are demolished. The essence of the Creative Destruction idea is to retain the memories of the old buildings, creating new buildings from the traces of those memories.
The faculty buildings are designed as hybrids, integrating
technology and functionality to create a dynamic system. Each faculty has its own library, administration, classrooms, student clubs and dormitories, without a hierarchy. Some of the spaces of each faculty unit are connected with external activities to create an open system. In general, a problem for campus students is that their dormitories are located far away from the faculties. Integrating the dormitories solves this problem, along with problems of communication, and the sense of non-place on campus after daytime hours.