Messy Collaboration

Architects, their consultants and school districts along with all their contributors are constantly debating and being asked to comment on the 21st Century Learning Environment. It's difficult to imagine this continuing to the be correct question when, last I checked, we are in the twenty-first century. Actually, fourteen years into the century and we are still developing schools similar in many aspects to the schools of the nineteenth century. How are we as architects challenging the design process that most of us are all too familiar? Are we merely changing up a few vocabulary words to fit with the current buzz words of our tech rich society so our client base feels comfortable with a few minor tweaks? Or is incorporating new technology in the classroom really what this about and not changing the process? Or are the architects truly involved with the process from curriculum design and debate? Are we part of the earliest community and board meetings where the first thoughts about a school are discussed? Are we working to create a design process and environment that helps districts formulate big changes that speak to the dynamics of our changing world...not just technology changes and wiring? And why would there even be a suggestion that is it important for an architect to be in the mix from the beginning and with the client's customers...and who are the client's customers?

And finally, are these questions relevant to either a 21st Century or a sustainable school.One of the big buzz words for both 21st Learning and sustainable design is collaboration. A truly collaborative process is extremely messy. It identifies all the potential customers the building will serve...not just the client who pays the bills and keeps the firm's doors open. There are many stakeholders including, but not limited to:
(1) The students and their parents who, while they may only inhabit the spaces for short periods of their lives, are the largest benefactor of collaboration.
(2) Teachers are an important part of how the space is used. They carry out curriculum and can feed curriculum changes that will support the building use. They are in the trenches with the largest customer group in a school on a daily basis. They are given spaces that may not make sense for changes in current curriculum or future direction of the educational process and what they need for their students.
(3) Administrative, food service and janitorial staff have needs and obligations along with limitations on their voices in the design process.
(4) Facility management professionals who are often the main connection of the design firm to the school district's customer base.
(5) School Boards have been elected to serve the best interest of the client but are not always at the table to be a part of the conversation.
(6) District Administration are the superintendents and principals who create part of the leadership and educational direction.

If we want to have a building that reflects what I see as one of the most important principals in the 21st Century process, everyone needs to be at the table regularly and without fail to provide input and design thoughts for their spaces.

What are the implications? Cost, of course, is a big one. Paying a design professional to be present from the beginning has a cost associated with it but it also has a big payoff for usability and relavance of the spaces that are created for the user groups. Time will be extended but can also be compressed with good communication and training for how to interact within the group process. Training will need to include information about the building and design process so the lay groups can understand what is needed and the concerns of facilities staffs and the design team. In my experience both in design and in the public realm, the result is an overall happier user group because they understand and can explain why decisions were made and how space were intended to be used within their curriculum base. The students will be engaged in something that is bigger than themselves. It can be a memorable part of their process in becoming a citizen and understanding how to participate in a public process. And, as a citizen rather than a consumer of that space, they may even help watch over, maintain, and create an atmosphere of safety by their mere presence emotionally and physically in the area.

Collaboration is messy. When we allow our groups to be citizens in the projects that are funded for them, we gain a new respect for our cities and what it takes to make great spaces!

L.E.A.R.N.
Learning Environments Architectural Research Network

Kimberly Adams - Concerned Professional Citizen and Teacher
Cheryl Bicknell Architect, LEED AP BD+C - one4one design, llc
Peggy Kinsey, Architect - Noneshe Architecture
Robert Matschelot, Architect, Educational Facility Planner - Edutecture, LLC

Gary Petri, Architect - Architect at Large and Heretect

Purpose:  LEARN is a loose group of architects and educators debating what makes a truly sustainable school.  Which schools are sustainable?  What makes them sustainable? Who is studying schools and their processes? How can we contribute to the debate and the process?

First Assignment:  As a group, we meet together for socializing, conversation and study.  In order to move our agenda forward, we have determined a public forum is required.  Each person in the group has been assigned to define one of our letters in LEARN and write what sustainability means to the individual.  What follows is a personal take on each topic.

Learning - Kimberly Adams
Environments - Peggy Kinsey
Architectural - Cheryl Bicknell
Research - Cheryl Bicknell
Network - Cheryl Bicknell

"L" is for Learning

Submitted by Kimberly Adams

Someone once said, “We live and learn, or we don’t live long.”

Let us apply the prescience and sentiment of this statement to the challenge we now face:  Redefining the concepts of success and happiness - so long associated with material wealth and consumption - with a kinder, gentler (OMG, I’m citing GHW Bush, IRONY ALERT!,) and above all, sustainable form of fulfillment. Because, if we keep consuming and discarding at our current rate – and the developing world is fast upon our heels – we will, literally, bury ourselves in our waste in very short order.

Somehow, in the push to be “Him with the most toys”, the joys of simple learning have been lost. We cram rote facts down the throats of our children, and hope that thinking, compassionate adults will somehow emerge from the tested, regurgitated debris. We build everything with the specific intention that it become obsolete as quickly as possible, and we teach our citizens that “easy”, “cheap”, and “disposable” are desirable qualitative adjectives. (I admit the first two CAN be entertaining in certain contexts. Ha, I kill me!)

The first step to change is admitting there is a problem, followed closely by identifying specific strategies that must be UNLEARNED, before they can be replaced by healthier habits. So, learning to let go of unsuccessful or disproven habits and hypotheses is a very good step toward a positive learning experience. (So! What did we learn today? We learned some new facts that completely disproved our hypothesis that dogs have telekinetic powers. Oh well, into the trash with it. Ego has no place in a Science classroom. Next?)

The most important thing we can, as thinking humans, ever learn, is just how much we DON’T know. That we can, conceivably, keep right on learning throughout our entire lives, and each and every day will bring new and vibrant information into our spectrum of knowledge, and each new piece of data place a new strand in our web of connected ideas. THIS, this lack of ego, this willingness to seek and incorporate new factual information into our knowledge base, and, if necessary, to discard old (even cherished) ideas in the face of new data, is the ability we need to teach. We need to learn again how to be simply curious, how to speculate, how to research, how to experiment, and how to reach deductive conclusions from what we observe.

I once had a news article on my refrigerator with a picture and the story of California’s oldest graduating college senior. She was 105. When asked for the secret of her long life, she replied, “Just don’t die. And, never stop learning.”) We live and learn. And it helps us live long.

"E" is for Environment

Submitted by Peggy Kinsey

Our environment is usually defined as having two distinct components – natural and human built. Both of these have a significant impact on human beings and particularly children. Natural is all that “Mother Earth” provides her inhabitants. From the air we breathe to the water that is a necessity for all living forms. Nature is a closed, balanced and interwoven system maintaining a dynamic stability. Humans have much to learn from the natural orders of the earth.

The built environment refers to human-made surroundings that provide the setting for human activity, ranging in scale from buildings and parks to neighborhoods and cities that often include their supporting infrastructure, such as water supply or energy networks. It has also been defined, by Roof and Olen, as “the human made spaces where people live, work, and recreate on a day-to-day basis.”

"A" is for Architectural
Submitted by Cheryl Bicknell
LEARN was started by a group of four architects experience in school design and maintenance coming together to create a debate regarding sustainable school design.  While the group felt qualified to answer questions about the building itself, the debate went beyond the physical structure.  We've added an educator with a background working in the building construction industry and hope these blogs and posts will intrigue others to join us.  While the architecture of a school may only say buildings to some, we hope it will also pique a conversation about the structure of the educational processes that occur within.

"R" is for Research
Submitted by Cheryl Bicknell
Part of the goal of our group is to research trends. The research comes from our experience as professionals in either the design of schools or the use of the school once it is built.  This means identifying the past and current research, trends and beliefs that identify how people are effected by the design and use of their spaces. It is both education specific and building environment general. Our curiosity will unearth the 'trends' that are truly new ideas or 'trends' that are promoted as new but have basis and practice in age old standards. The challenge for the group is to incorporate what is supported through research into the conversation in our communities at large.

"N" is for Network
Submitted by Cheryl Bicknell
For the concepts of a truly sustainable school to spread, a variety of ideas and people can come together to add to the net of ideas.  As the small group of, now five, grows, we hope the ideas will also grow, expand and create debates beyond the original members. The network can grow with you.  Please contact one of the people within this list if you are interested in joining our conversation in person.  We meet once per month at a local restaurant and try to have a little homework to complete for our next meeting.  And, our homework this time was to write a blog and create a curiosity for the ideas about schools that are being considered.

Sustainability:

Submitted by Kimberly Adams

Sustainability is a word I’ve been thinking a lot about, lately. It brings to mind other, similar words, like sustain, and sustenance, and (if we want to humor my alliterative bent,) success.

In the music world, “sustain” describes the act of maintaining a note over a period of time. To do it well requires the skillful synchronicity of both the instrument’s objective mechanics, and the more subjective artistry of the musician. It takes energy, it takes education (knowledge of the instrument, and of the language of music, itself,) and it takes practice. In other words, sustain doesn’t just “happen”.

The word sustenance evokes, for me, deep feelings of very basic needs being met. I envision a babe at the breast, embraced, nourished, loved.

Sustainability, as a word and a concept, has acquired a kind of crunchy granola, Birkenstock-wearing, organic, green social patina. That is unfortunate, as it creates a polarized political climate around a concept that should – by all logic – be a primary concern to all citizens of all communities. If we want to survive, creating a sustainable social paradigm is not merely desirable, but critical. And, while I grant that the creation of sustainable food and energy production, and sustainable architecture and other resource use is of vast importance, the role and goal of educators – to create citizens who are prepared to engineer and equip this emerging society – is at the very foundation of our success, not merely as a community, or a nation, but as a species.

So, in my mind, sustainability IS success. (And God help you, should you have a lisp.) Sustainability is the golden ticket to a future in which our citizens have the knowledge and the know-how to cleanse the mistakes of our pathologically-imprudent consumption (or at least to not continue exacerbating those mistakes.) Success means building homes, and businesses, and learning environments that demonstrate – by their very structures and utilities – that we, as communities, have come to recognize and value the diversification of usage, the longevity of materials and design, and the necessity of protecting the cleanliness of the food and water that provides us all with sustenance. And, finally, that the education and preservation of those values tops our list of human priorities. 

Sustainability:

Submitted by Peggy Kinsey

“ It is our task in our time and in our generation to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as handed down to us by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours”  JOHN F. KENNEDY – 1961

  

“In order to create a vibrant, sustainable future, we must first visualize the world we want to create” BRYAN WELCH – EDITOR OF MOTHER EARTH NEWS

  

“It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.”

DONELLA MEADOWS – LIMITS OF GROWTH 1972

“We developed the concept of sustainable development, which means we must meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”  GRO HARLEM BRUNDTLAND – OUR COMMON FUTURE 1987

“Sustainabilty equals wisdom plus compassion.”  JANE TALKINGTON – THE SUSTAINABILITY EQUATION

“Sustain that which makes life worth living. What makes life worth living?”  JANINE BENYUS

Sustainability:
Submitted by Cheryl Bicknell
Is the question, "What is a 21st Century School and Classroom?" or is the question, "What makes a truly sustainable school and what is the guidance clients and users require to create one?" This is the conundrum.  In the same vein, one must then wonder what does sustainability really encompass when it refers to a school or an educational space?

For me, a sustainable school is more than just a building that houses the educational process but one that has viability over many years of use.  It takes into account the training of a student as a citizen, a parent, a possible college student, a member of a community, a business owner.  It is basically teaching them how they will ultimately fit into the world they are experiencing and then learning to adapt to the world they will experience. The school supports this with spaces that teach the skills of daily life like gardening and its sciences, cooking and its sciences.  It creates technology labs that train students to create not only robots and rockets but items of beauty that are used in current daily life...and their sciences. They work with students who will to create a future for which they are proud whether or not college is immediately in their future or ever an option. A sustainable school is the center of the community and becomes an important resource. It looks to the unknown future and thinks about how human beings make interconnections and lifelong curiosity to meet the new challenges. 

The building as a school is a little more concrete and can't always be defined by a checklist.  It makes its own energy; cleans its own air; reuses its water; recycles and composts its waste.  It's efficient with use of resources.  It's healthy and maintains the health of students. It's long-lasting and is built for a life longer than fifty years.  It has both programmed and un-programmed spaces where students, community members and teachers can define uses as a changing world requires.  It allows for experimentation and creativity. The school is well connected with mass transportation or options for walking and riding bicycles in order to free the resources of parents. The building is also connected into the natural world with classrooms that can access both the environment inside and outside, no matter what level the students may be.

Perhaps these ideas of a sustainable school are Utopian principles for many. For continuous viability, however, in a world of technology and online learning, there are still social needs that human beings have.  Diversifying the options in the realm of learning and education within the school will also sustain the building over time. It becomes a necessary resource rather than an expendable antique.