About Interior Architecture and Environmental Design

Interior Architecture and Environmental Design is a discipline creating aesthetic and functional, creative and technical interior space solutions by adhering to the professional ethical rules, standards and legal frameworks mainly in the building shell in a way to provide the health, comfort and security of the users and to increase the quality of their lives in a sustainable way. An interior architect is responsible for the design, application, and the control of the environmental systems such as furniture equipment and illumination, acoustics, electricity, and ventilation system and the design components such as the form regarding the surfaces and the volume of the interior space, material, and color, pattern by determining the physical, social and psychological requirements of the user assumed to be privileged in interior architecture.

The interior architect and environmental designer may be the person who forms the decisions of the interior space and who participates in the process in a team within the scope of the architectural project during the first construction process of the building. It may as well be the person who performs the renovation on the basis of the interior space decisions according to the new conditions when a requirement for renovation comes out due to reasons such as change of function and/or user as to the building, aging and similar reasons. It would not be wrong to define interior architecture as a scale between architecture and industrial design. Having tight relations with these two design disciplines, the discipline can produce projects in an extensive range of fields such as building scale, furniture and lighting design, vitrine design, scenery and set design, exhibition design, fair stand design, design of yacht interior spaces, urban furniture design. It can also perform the restoration or adaptive reuse of the interior spaces of the buildings regarded in the cultural heritage.

The graduates of the Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design can be employed in public sectors in interior architecture positions as an administrative and technical staff in such institutions as municipalities and ministries or as a designer and/or an executer as part of a team in offices of interior architecture, architecture or other design fields. The interior architects who wish to serve freelance interior architecture and environmental design can carry out design and application practice in their own offices; in addition, they can give consultancy. At the same time, they can be employed as designer, applicator, sales person or controller in firms such as kitchen, bathroom, lighting and furniture design. In addition, it is also possible for them to be employed as a researcher and/or lecturer in universities if they decide to take part in the academy.

Particularly, interior architecture and decoration are frequently mixed in our country. It is very significant to highlight the difference between these two fields. Interior Architecture, as summarized above, is the art and science of creating functional spaces within the building shell by making sense of the attitudes of the users, whereas the decoration is only to furnish the space and generally to equip the surfaces of the space with ornamental elements.

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Prof. (PhD) Zeynep TUNA ULTAV
Department Head, Interior Architecture and Environmental Design