Connecting In and Through the Environment

Public institutions can be sterile, cold, and lifeless places that isolate us from the world and each other.  Or they can be dynamic places that connect and animate people and the spaces they inhabit.  We believe that schools should be places that sense what is happening outside—from the weather to seasonal changes, from the time of day to the rhythms of the community.

Our physical spaces speak to us in a language that carries cultural conceptions and has deep biological roots.  In every sensory perception there is a part governed by biological memory, another part determined by the cultural environment and the generation to which one belongs, and another part linked to personal stories and perceptions.

This language of space is very strong because it is analogical—it conveys patterns of similarity and coherence that are deeply visual.  Although its code is not always explicit and recognizable, we perceive it and interpret it from a very early age.   Good design, by helping us to visualize how we create attachments, can take advantage of this code to design schools that actively transform connections.

The individual drive for integration and coherence represents a need that is fundamental to human thought and to our well-being.  It helps us make sense of where and who we are—to find our way and to define our ‘self’, to orient ourselves in the world.  We believe that the education of children lies in helping them study their ways of making meaning and making connections.  Learning to see and reflect on the patterns in the world around us helps us to plan and make decisions.  In this sense, we are all designers.

It may seem well understood and even simplistic to say that school architecture—the interior spaces, the buildings, and the landscape—plays an important educational function.   We know that the contexts of learning—emotional, aesthetic, and physical—are like learning glue.  They influence how learning sticks in the mind.  People tend to remember better when the object or idea is put into a meaningful context that reflects their experience.  And we know that when the places in which we learn—and are taught—have more meaning to us, we are better able to recall and reintegrate facts and ideas in our minds

Once the tacit experience of patterns and design is made explicit and recognized, our educational practice becomes more conscious.  More acutely aware, we develop a discerning intelligence by which we can discover the relevant likeness in unlike things. This analogical method allows us to perceive limits, get the scale of things right, calibrate human purpose, and do so with grace and dignity. There is elegance and basic understanding to be found in the general patterns that emerge that allow us to appreciate the beauty in the diversity of nature.

Transforming Schools

Places that are consciously well-designed for human activity and connections satisfy our need for coherent visions, images, perceptions, and concepts.  Intentional place-making requires a set of design principles that reflect our abilities to artfully shape public spaces and recognize how those spaces shape us.

We do not seek one unique blueprint to serve as an all- comprehensive educational model.  But we do think that making patterns and cycles visible provides lit pathways and stronger connections to our world.  A well-designed school that strives for building these connections will adopt an ethical view of our connections in and to the world, based on practices inherent to an ecological framework—sustainability and stewardship of our public spaces and the earth. Second, it will take its measure from the natural limits and human scale of things.  And third, it will recognize biological and cultural diversity as important sources of beauty and human strength.

Patterns are everywhere—they are one of our best sources of information about the world.  The environment itself is a critical teacher, but we are crippled by the overload of visual stimuli, pushed at us so fast we cannot read it.  One of the best ways to find patterns is to go looking for them with a camera—photography focuses our attentions and enriches our awareness of patterns.  We adopt the philosophy that design has content that can be taught—seeing is not a unique talent, but a discipline that can be learned and applied.

Therefore, at The Blue Adobe Project we plan to:

• Design buildings and landscapes that help to string patterns together, developing measures of scale, rhythm, balance, and perspective;

• Integrate the visual arts and spatial technologies to explore patterns—their content, form, and function—and teach the language of vision—light, shape, texture, movement, lines, similarities, contrasts;

• Develop an understanding of our responsibility for design and the ethic that good design matters;

• Draw deeply from the earth sciences and the pattern languages in the world around us;

• Use technology to see the landscape from a 21st century perspective—satellite images of the earth and sonar views of the ocean floor.