Zoos help people to learn through exhibiting the relationships of animals in nature. Therefore, they have the important missions of education and protection of wild life. Most of these missions are achieved through visitors' experiences in exhibit areas. Therefore, it is important to understand visitors' experiences in the zoo and know the reasons that affect these experiences. Animals should exhibit normal behaviors actively to enable visitors to have positive experiences during their visits. For this reason, the design of exhibit areas is significant. The purpose of this study is to determine the visitors' perceptual descriptions in the zoos including different exhibit areas and their reasons to visit them. Thus, the role of the zoos in enabling visitors to learn nature protection and have environmental consciousness is explored correlating with zoo typologies. In this study, three zoos in different typologies in Turkey have been examined and it is conducted in two stages. In the first stage, the typologies of the zoos have been identified. In the second stage, a questionnaire has been conducted to find out the visitors' visiting aims, the extent they reached these aims, their level of appreciation and their perceptions on exhibit areas. The questionnaire has been performed with 450 zoo visitors, and there have been 150 visitors from each zoo. According to the results of this study, it has been explored that visitors visit the zoos mostly for "education" without considering the design approach. However, it has been found out that the design of exhibit areas affects visitors' level of appreciation and their zoo descriptions. It has been identified that as the level of appreciation increases, the level of reaching aims increases.

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The present study that aimed to determine the effects of the project classes conducted in the design studio on students was scrutinized specifically on the studio work conducted within the context of Environmental Design Project Course studio practice in Karadeniz Technical University Landscape Architecture Department. The study was a studio practice. In the first phase of the study, the content and practice of the studio course was examined. In the next phase, a survey was conducted with 174 students to investigate the effects of the fact that the courses were conducted in the studio environment on design students. The survey aimed to inquire the effects of the studio on the students' creativity, development and learning of design skills. The satisfaction of the students in this course and their views about the use of the process in their future professional life was studied. Survey questions were asked to freshmen, sophomore, junior and senior students and the differences between these classes were determined. The questions were assessed using a 5-point Likert attitude scale. Conducted statistical analyses (SPSS 23.0) demonstrated that students considered the studios as environments that improve their creativity the most, students at all levels were satisfied with the studios, but that their satisfaction increased with their seniority, and they wanted to utilize this process in their professional lives and this desire was most prevalent among senior students. Correlation analysis findings demonstrated that satisfaction with the process was mostly related to the learning process. The present study findings demonstrated that design studios were instruction environments that provide students with design skills, improve their creativity and provide them practice opportunities. Study findings also revealed that the students were satisfied with design courses instructed in the studio and desired to experience the same process in their professional lives as well.

It is important how novice designers can produce shapes in the design-oriented parts where creativity and form creation is prior. Designers can abstract the t ideas in their minds by taking advantage of the forms, metrics, and relationships that exist in nature. For this reason, how designers can transform their ideas to forms has been analyzed by experienced designers in this research. The form of visual data obtained from the nature is obtained by the abstraction of the visual data and the addition of the designer's own style instead of using the imitation of the individual. The shape of nature in the result of abstraction; there is a new meaning and form again. For this reason, in the study, the "effect of creating form" and "how to generate form" in nature inspiration process presented in two stages:In the first step, each unit forming the visual of the nature and the side-by-side relations of these units were examined and their formal characteristics were evaluated and made abstraction. In the second stage, the transformations of the lines obtained as a result of abstraction are provided. At the end of the study, the formations which are formed in the nature are analyzed in terms of measure and direction for the system definition, and the understanding of the system existing in the nature is transferred to the formal fiction of the design and it is exemplified how it is reflected in a landscape project. Thus, it is possible that novice designers can observe, analyze and synthesize natural samples in this way. Being able to do this well facilitates the process of form creation and improves the designers' ability to refer to the environment as a reference.

A society with a culture of sustainability perceives urban culture more intensely, and a culture of sustainability could also develop more easily in societies that strongly perceive the urban culture. On sustainability of urban spaces, the relationship between physical, sociocultural and psychological sub-components is effective. Therefore, environmental organizations that allow cultural sustainability are very important in preventing the alienation of the members of the society to each other and the space and creating cultural diversity. Contemporary cities and spaces are defined and characterized by symbolic references. The present study focused on the concepts of cultural sustainability and symbolic landscape. The primary aim of the present study was to investigate the physical (activity and space) interaction of cultural change in symbolic landscapes and satisfaction with the spaces. Initially, a survey was conducted with 18 experts to determine the effects of landmarks on urban cultural sustainability and then, the same survey was conducted with 186 occupants in Trabzon province open spaces in Turkey. In the survey, the sustainability of open spaces that symbolize the city was questioned. Then, One-Sample T test and Correlation analyzes were conducted on the survey data using SPSS (v. 23.0) software. It was determined that Hagia Sophia and Boztepe were the most influential landmarks on urban cultural sustainability. As a result, it was demonstrated that Hagia Sophia, Boztepe, Meydan park, Ganita, City Walls, Atatürk mansion, Soumela Monastery, and Uzungol were effective on cultural sustainability as urban landmarks. One-Sample T test was conducted with SPSS (v. 23.0) software to determine whether the differences in the effects of the landmarks on cultural sustainability based on activity diversity were statistically significant. The test results demonstrated that the landmarks had statistically different effects on cultural sustainability based on reflecting the activity diversity (p <0.01). The present study findings demonstrated that Meydan park and Ganita stood out as the urban landmarks that affected cultural sustainability the most in satisfaction. Because, these two spaces are easy to reach in the urban center with historical significance and dense occupancy. Thus, they were prominent in cultural sustainability.