asafford4

Jul 14, 202122 min read

City as a Classroom...and why aesthetics matter

This entry is based on a presentation Gail Whitney Karn and Alison Safford gave at the 2021 Global Education Benchmark Group conference focusing on Global STEM and Sustainability.

Where STEAM Meets Sustainability: Examples from Italy and the Netherlands

We will start with an exercise on noticing I have done with students to get them to slow down and re-examine the world around them.

From artist and educator Michelle Illuminato: “The ability to focus your attention, to be presence in your experience and to recognize what you are gleaning from the experience is one of the most foundational and valuable skills of the artist. In a word, the ability to notice. I’m not alone highlighting noticing as one of the most important skills an artist can have in their toolbox. Recently I was listening to internationally acclaimed artist, Grayson Perry’s, “I Found Myself in the Art World” lecture (all of his Reith lectures are so worth a good listen). He tells the story of a friend, who was leading a workshop for children at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. She asked the group on the first day, “What does an artist do?” One answered, “They sit around in Starbucks and eat organic salads.” At the end of the workshop, after exploring the job of making art they were asked the same question. This time in response one young person said, “They notice things.” Grayson Perry goes on to say, yes that is exactly what he and artists do, his job is to notice things that other people do not know." So how do we learn to notice?

What you will need to do the exercise:

A toilet paper tube, paper towel tube or a piece of paper rolled up to approximately the same diameter.
A paper and pencil/pen
A finite space in a room: this will not be “my bedroom” but more specific… under my bed, the top right-hand side of my desk, my pile of laundry, the third shelf of my bookshelf, my windowsill…. you want it specific and finite
10 minutes (set a timer on your phone or watch)

What you will do.

Set the timer for 10 minutes.

Look through the tube at your location of choice.

For those 10 minutes, write down EVERYTHING that you see or notice.

After two minutes you will think you are done.

You are not.

Look harder.

What did you miss because it was too detailed?

What did you miss because it was too obvious?

What did you miss because you didn’t think it was important?

Look longer.

What did you miss because your eye or brain assumed?

What did you miss in the space between things?

What did you miss because it is not visual?

Look deeper.

Keep writing.

See how long you can make your list.

The longer the better.

When the alarm goes off you are done.

Where STEAM Meets Sustainability: The Netherlands Trip

So, why does noticing matter in art, design, or STEAM, and to go to a bigger point, life in general?

We will examine this, but first let me show you how we used noticing during our study trip to the Netherlands.

In 2017 I brought 15 students from the Cambridge School of Weston to the Netherlands to study Social Design (also known as Human Centered Design); which my definition of is “to draw attention to or repair a social or environmental issue”.

Sustainability, to me, is where the social and the environmental meet.

The idea of the quality of life and the communal is at the center of this form of design which combines the fields of art, design, engineering, architecture, sociology, sciences, technology, social justice, and more. To me, this makes it the ultimate interdisciplinary field.

My home school, the Cambridge School of Weston, has a social justice focus and curriculum where we help students think critically about equity and justice and to empower them to respond to matters of inequity/injustice in the world. Connecting that to ideas related to art and design made if perfect to consider social design as it pertains to our school’s mission.

The Netherlands is the epicenter of Social Design

It was made very clear to students that this was not a field trip, but a working trip, and the students took that to heart.

NOTICING AT NORDEMARKT AND NDSM

How does one start to think about a project?

First, you need to SEE what is actually THERE.

To help students slow down and take time to look, they were given notebooks. We asked them to note and sketch things that were unfamiliar, new, or in some way intriguing. We also made sure to give them time to do this. As an art teacher, I always emphasize drawing is about thinking as much as reproducing, and that the goal is often simply to communicate an observation or an idea.

Students at Piet Blom's Cube Houses in Rotterdam, and with Ted Munter of the Molly School examining the city of Amsterdam

To our students, Amsterdam had both familiar and unfamiliar aspects.

It is familiar in that it is western country where communication is simple (most of the Dutch speak English very well), and is culturally known given the historical connections between the Netherlands and the US.

It is unfamiliar in that Dutch culture is:

· more focused on the communal quality of life of citizens

· it’s not a car culture in the same way as the US

· it has its own history and current social problems (many of which intersect with those of the US)

We wanted them to learn to see the art, design, and architecture of Amsterdam as ways of seeing, and as clues that would tell us more about the Dutch culture.

Why are the houses so narrow? How did they build on the marshy land, and how did that connect to Dutch value of the communal? And on.

We worked (here with Ted Munter from the Molly School leading us) to get students to notice how Dutch urban structures reflect their cultural values, and how these values can impact the development of a city, which in turn led to further discussions where students learned the driving forces behind their observations.

We wanted them to learn to look beyond the familiar.

We pushed them to consider their lens as outsiders, to be careful to not make cultural assumptions but to ask questions. It was important that they realize the Dutch knew what they were doing with their own culture. This, of course, is a good lesson for any time one is in another culture.

From left to right: artist/jeweler Ruudt Peters, architect Jasper DeHaan, students at Mediamatic with mycelium based material, and architect at 3D Print House showing students sample prints

Next we visited Dutch creatives to see how the Dutch were engaged with their own culture. Students were asked to focus on how the creatives discovered and researched their ideas. Some of them used newer technologies (3D printing), and some of it was older technologies (like planting tulip bulbs). We wanted students to consider the right technology for the situation, to move beyond the illusion that newer is better.

Some of the creatives we visited with were:

· The architects behind the 3D Print Canal House

· an artist working with immigrant populations in creating public works

· art-jewelers showing us the importance of research in their creative process

· Mediamatic - an organization combining science, art, farming, and food

· Architect Jasper DeHaan who led us on a tour of social architecture in Rotterdam

· Boost-an organization preparing recent immigrants (new-comers*) and the neighborhood for each other

Showing diverse approaches helped point students to the bigger picture, as well as the complexities of a culture.

Arjan Braaksma of Burobraak and his work

We met with Burobraak, a social design firm, to learn how they use design to educate the Dutch public about Zwart Piet/Black Pete. If you are unfamiliar feel free to google the controversy, as it is too much to go into here in a way that serves the topic.

(blog entry on Burobraak

https://asafford4.wixsite.com/sdanded/post/burobraak-and-working-against-racism-in-the-netherlands )

They helped us see how sustainability can relate to sustaining a culture as it changes, to create a more equitable and just culture for all citizens.

We learned about Arjan’s own journey in noticing that Zwart Piet was more than a children’s character, and it was a tradition with a hurtful impact on many Dutch citizens. Now it’s important to Arjan to use his design skills to help promote issues of equity and social justice in the Netherlands, creating a more sustainable culture for all citizens.

Cigarettes for Lollies: A Student Solution

An emphasis for the student’s project was that they address an actual observable problem; not a theoretical one.

Students were given prompts as a beginning point to research a social problem, and were then to design a project that would work towards addressing a related issue. We encouraged them to use their observations around Amsterdam as a starting point.

Along with addressing a complexity of lenses- from social and cultural context to budget, from to material and technological metrics to costs and environmental impact-the final presentation had to be done in a visually compelling manner, and all by hand. The pragmatic reason for this was not having access to a printer, the pedagogical was to get them to produce the aesthetics by hand, which would involve more decision making on their part.

In the project shown above, students developed a program called Cigarettes for Lollies.

It was a multi-layered project to help Dutch-youth break the smoking habit. They designed bicycle information centers where you could exchange cigarettes for lollypops. They designed not just the mobile information center, but a system that would continually build upon itself helping people quit long term. They even designed ways to use the confiscated cigarettes in art, design, and architecture.

MOBILE GARDENS ON THE CANALS: Another Student Solution

Science and technology are often (mistakenly) thought of as separate from the everyday lives of citizens; we don’t need to know how it works as long as it does. We wanted to use art to address that false dichotomy, and to make the invisible visible. Art and aesthetics are tools of inquiry, but also a way to include dignity in a design and to bring awareness to sustainability.

Including meaningful aesthetics is also another problem-solving opportunity.

In the built-world, aesthetics are often an afterthought to function, or seen as an unnecessary expense. I would argue that this view is a failure of imagination, and that good aesthetics are a matter of human dignity. Paraphrasing Dutch designer Remy Ramakers, “even in war you need poetry.”

And like poetry, aesthetics ultimately do have a function.

So, while we stressed aesthetics in the presentation of the book projects, we also stressed the importance of aesthetics in the final design.

This design is for a series of mobile gardens that would float on the canals. Students designed it as a community-based project including new-comer communities, taking into account nutritious plants that were suited to hydroponics.

Our work time became a wonderful study in collaboration. As many teachers have experienced, students can moan when you talk about collaboration. But we also know from studies (and observation) that collaboration creates better outcomes when involving members with different views, strengths, and experiences.

The project wasn’t graded, so that pressure was off, which of course is a big caveat.

Groups were formed to balance out the students’ areas of interest and knowledge, so that each member was an essential part of the whole.

FINAL PRESENTATIONS

At the end of our time in Amsterdam, students gave a final presentation of their projects to panelists comprised of creatives we had visited.

This was a final act of collaboration, and they had to answer some tough questions from mostly native Amsterdammers.

Students had many take-aways from enjoying the city’s architecture, culture, and food, and even 4 years later, they remember much of what we hoped to instill.

Fia (current RISD painting student)

“As a group, (we) were asked to deeply consider everything we came into contact with in that two-week trip…it pushed all of us to be considerate in a new and caring way.”

Rikean (current design student at Parsons Paris)

“The experience had a huge impact on how I now understand and practice design as a problem-finding and problem-solving process”

Katie (current linguistics student at NYU)

“I learned how all design MUST be social design”

My Own LESSONS LEARNED

To date I have only run this trip once, as covid curtailed our 2020 iteration. There were many things I learned from the first trip that I would modify for the next trip including:

· Require that students pick out specific problem based in Amsterdam (some strayed)

· Require first-hand research-talk to Dutch people!

· Look at how tourism affects livability (big issue in Amsterdam)

· Add elements to look more directly at race issues in the NL, to talk about how colonialism and exploitation had a hand in developing a city and to see what still remains from that history, physically and culturally. I believe this would help students to look at our own history with a fresh view.

· More food ( I knew teenagers ate a lot, but was amazed by what that actually meant !)

HOW DO I USE WHAT I LEARNED IN MY CLASSROOM

Here is an example from Wearable Art,

a course about making creative clothing, but I also emphasize the relationship that “making” has to the greater issues of consumerism and sustainability.

Here, students were asked to somehow wear their entire wardrobe.

Italian Examples from Gail Whitney Karn

My pedagogy has been formed by living in Germany where my children matriculated through the public school system. Material was taught holistically and encouraged critical thinking contrasting sharply to the educational system in which I had taught graduate students, prompting me to rethink pre-university level education.

I left academe and founded an education non-profit, Center for Sustainable Urbanism, with a holistic pedagogy and a focus on sustainability. CFSU’s summer program, CIAO! (Center for Introduction to Architecture Overseas) is an experiential program, in Rome and Sant’Angelo in Pontano, providing students an opportunity to learn from a holistic and sustainability perspective about the built environment.

Reading ROME

An integral part of the CIAO! experience, Rome is a living laboratory of the built environment featuring centuries of Art, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Engineering, Urban Planning, and Building Technology. From ancient to modern times, from aqueducts to mass transit, Rome offers valuable insights into how the design of buildings and places fits with – and reflects – a culture.

Studying the built environment is critical for understanding sustainability as around 40% of greenhouse gas emissions are generated from buildings both their construction and their operation. Residential housing comprises 20% alone.

The urban fabric of a city is composed of its solids and voids, its urban patterning. A partial mapping of Rome, in 1748 by Giambattista Nolli, is show below. Much of this urban fabric remains the same today. Mapped are the public voids in relationship to solid buildings.

A city is an amalgam of various epochs of build, and each city fabric has its own pattern. To understand what we are looking at in a city today, to really see it, we must know its history, its story, its background. For Rome that means starting from 2774 years ago!

We break down STE(A)M roughly via various eras.

STEAM in Antiquity

With STEAM in Antiquity, we learn how the ancient engineers developed:

• The arch

• The Vault: both the Barrel vault and the groin vault

• Coffering strengthening the vault; increasing its span

• Buttressing as in arenas like the Colosseum

And we discuss the physics involved, including the statics, behind all of this.

From the Architecture in Antiquity we talk about:

The Politics of power: from the Republic through the Empire
- How Government was carried out in the Curia
- How the Military-might was expressed in Triumphal Arches
- How Religion was expressed in the temples to their gods
- How Justice was expressed in the court buildings of Basilica Emelia and Basilica Giulia
- And how Wealth was evident in the money exchangers who were located on their steps
We note the power of built form through the way Imperial Power meant diminishing humans in size
Imperial Rome had a Metropolitan population of over 1 million people, as urbane as modern cities today, including mid-rise apartment buildings, and shopping centers. In fact, Trajan’s Markets was the world’s first “shopping mall” containing over 150 stores!

STEAM in Renaissance

For STEAM in the Renaissance we discuss:

• the invention of perspective by an engineer and then perfected by Brunelleschi

• Brunelleschi also perfected Proportion in building as exemplified by the Tempietto

• Again, we touch upon Physics in the statics of columns and their proportions as well as the span of roofs

• At the Palazzo Spada (image below), we have some fun with the students having them guess the height of the statue which typically they say around 6 ft. In fact, it is only 22 inches. Trompe l’oeil perspective is achieved through tilting up the floor, tilting down the ceiling and tilting in the side walls. What appears to be a gallery of 30 meters is really less than 3!

We talk about the Renaissance Man who was both Architect, Painter and Sculptor

As an example:

• Michelangelo, was the architect of the dome of St. Peter’s, painter of Sistine Chapel and sculptor of the Pieta all just for the Vatican

Historically learning from Rome means understanding how, throughout its history

Art has been integrated with Architecture. A case in point is the Galleria Borghese whose private art collection is now open to the public

STEAM in Contemporary Rome

For our learning about STEAM in Rome today, we visit the MAXXI (Museum of Art of XXI Century) by world –renowned architect, Zaha Hadid. Here we discuss the Integration of engineering and architecture, and how the architect’s concept for a museum is expressed in the dynamism of its form, structure, and interior circulation.

Hadid believed art should never be viewed statically but from multiple viewpoints.

In contemporary Rome we learn…

• Mechanical, Electrical and Climate engineering from the systems at the MAXXI museum

• Bridge design from world renowned Engineer Calatrava whose pedestrian bridge we examine

• Acoustical engineering at the Opera House designed by the famous architect, Renzo Piano

STEAM: Science and Technology

We also focus on Material Science through the Invention of concrete; Roman concrete is stronger today than when constructed and stronger than modern concrete! We look at Roman brick versus modern brick. We see how modern architecture has been inspired by ancient techniques. In this example, by Deputy Minister of Culture, Francesco Scoppola used NASA developed textile in the renovation of Renaissance Palazzo Altemps. Inspired by retractable awning of the Colosseo. The fabric and form allow daylight into the space, but prevents damage to frescoes, and other artwork.

Throughout all epochs we stress how Romans recycled and reused buildings from Temples in the Foro Romano being converted to churches, to the Pantheon (saving it from extinction) to the Teatro Marcellus, where Caesar was attacked, and now contains up-to-date apartments within its historic frame. Rome wastes nothing!

Students Sketching

To not just look, but to really see, students are encouraged to sketch what they are viewing. Seeing is not just looking; sketching is truly seeing. It is also a part of our pedagogy to construct by hand; to use technology as a tool but not a substitute for constructing something yourself which uses the brain in a different way. Freehand sketching is one such skill we promote the development of; viewing the city with regards to its scale and how it relates to humans also touches upon Social Design.

VOIDS and SPACES IN-BETWEEN

Thirty spokes converge upon a single hub;

It is on the hole in the center that the use of the car hinges

We make a vessel from a lump of clay;

It is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful

We make doors and windows for a room;

But it is these empty spaces that make the room livable

Thus while the tangible has advantages;

It is the intangible that makes it useful

- Lao Tzu

Spaces in Between

Streets for Circulating

The streets in-between buildings are examined at different scales from the busiest to those intimate enough to be able to roof with living plants. We remind the students that the spaces in-between have as much value as the buildings

Voids / Plazas

Plazas are voids for gathering whether for a market as in Campo dei Fiori, for government and culture as in Piazzi at the Campidoglio, or just for enjoyment as in the Piazza Navona. Here, another example of recycle and reuse as the piazza was originally a circus, or racetrack, for the Emperor Domitian whose stands are now replaced by buildings but whose oval racetrack form remains.

Voids / Gardens

Gardens are green voids giving the city spaces to breathe. From the ancient Villa Adriana to the Renaissance Villa d’Este and Borghese Gardens to the gardens of the American Academy in Rome’s Villa Aurelia, Romans have understood the value of and need for green space and connection to nature.

Green Systems

Which brings us to Green Systems. Reading a city, one needs to be cognizant of its urban systems. Throughout Rome one finds green elements spanning a street, climbing a wall, totally encasing the built form. Another way the natural elements are present in the urban environment. While at street level Rome may appear to be made of mostly hard surfaces, when seen from the rooftops there are green gardens everywhere! There is an acute understanding of the need to balance the natural with the manmade.

City Water Systems

From the Fontana di Trevi to the humble street fountain, urban systems and services, such as water, are examined. The water system of Rome not only provides free, delicious and healthy water to its public, but the element of water helps cool the city in summer. Students also learn of the engineering of the ancient aqueducts as a means of bringing to the city both fresh water from the mountains and salt water from the sea.

And of course we have the students toss a coin over their shoulder at the Trevi as legend says doing so will insure your return one day to the Eternal City!

Urban Mobility

Urban mobility is of major importance when considering sustainability. Rome is a very walkable city yet also offers mass transit via busses, many of which are electric, trams and the ubiquitous taxi, now predominantly electric. In an effort to stave off destruction of Rome’s famous sites from antiquity, modern steps to reduce traffic has included creating ecological islands where cars are forbidden. Increased tram lines and both bike and electric car sharing are recent effort to green up the city.

Even delivery now is often from a bike riding delivery person!

Sant’Angelo in Pontano

The goal of the Rome immersion is to help students understand the relationship between the built environment and sustainability. And, to realize the interrelationships between the STEAM disciplines; how that cross-pollination enriches an environment with respect both to the built-form and to the spaces in-between.

Students document their experiences through free-hand sketching and photography and lively discussions over meals help them digest the lessons learned in Rome.

Their sketches and photos are referenced in the studio component of the program held over the following two weeks in Sant’Angelo in Pontano where they apply the lessons learned. Students are issued a design assignment reflecting a real need of the village or one nearby. They review programmatic requirements, conduct a site visit, and make a site analysis from which they each generate a design concept.

VIDEO of Sant’Angelo

CFSU’s center is in the foreground in the lower left-hand corner. The village is a safe retreat from the urban bustle and provides an appropriate environment for focused learning.

Food and Sustainability

Leading by example, the facility offers its own garden for herbs and vegetables and trees offering fruits and nuts. Students are immersed in the local flora and fauna. The center has an orchard of olive trees and its faculty instruct the students on the process of olive oil pressing. These are a few of our lessons in sustainable living.

Atalier

Living and working in an atelier environment at CFSU’s facility, they receive one-on-one instruction in studio developing designs: initial, developed, final. They work in freehand, on laptops with Google SketchUp. Small class size makes this personal tutoring possible but larger classes would be manageable with more teaching assistants working one on one with students.

Model Shop

In the model shop, students learn constructing by hand their working and final models, again a part of our philosophy about the learning process.

Students also participate in studio group chats, deliver an in-house presentation, and receive evaluations of their designs. Here differing class sizes could affect different group dynamics.

School Designs

They then present their final projects to the mayor, visiting dignitaries and town residents. This is what sets this program apart from others. To offer design solutions to a real community problem and then to present those ideas to the community most closely replicates real world practice.

In 2018 Sant’Angelo in Pontano received EU monies to build a new school. So ciao! students offered their own individual design ideas addressing this need. Interpolating the programmatic needs to concepts on education, the students adapted to a rural school program: students from pre-kindergarten through middle school all in the same facility. Scanning these images, it is easy to see that each idea was independently developed reflecting the uniqueness of each student.

Presentations

Each year the program addresses a different local or regional need and each year that community turns out to view the students’ ideas. After presenting to a room full of locals plus the community’s mayor and other dignitaries, students tell me that college interviews are a snap!

The outcome of the program has been a raised awareness in its alums of sustainability issues, a post-program active alum network and exceptional student success at the university level. For me personally, the heightened awareness is the key take away and what make it so gratifying for me to direct this program.

Through the Lens of the Classroom

Both Amsterdam and Rome clearly have lessons to learn in their outdoor classrooms, some of them listed here.

•Timeline: epoch of build

•Solids/voids

•Public/private

•Density

•Spaces in-between

•Circulation/Access/Mobility

•Systems/Services

But how do we apply these lessons to cities in America or other parts of the world? Let's explore the same metrics in a few American cities...

Walkability Metrics

How to assess sustainability varies widely. In the United States alone there are multiple definitions of and metrics for sustainability.

A personal favorite of Gail’s is from the first peoples of current-day US, who say they don't have a word for it because they live it and have sustained themselves for more than 10,000 years! This shows how indigenous peoples across the world already were connecting what we are calling STEAM in ways that interconnect, with a holistic approach.

One popular metric of urban sustainability is mobility: how walkable is a city? How easy is it to navigate on bicycle? How connected are the neighborhoods with mass transit?

Above we take a look at cities on the East Coast (for sake of simplicity) and you can see that three cities rank high with regards to walkability and biking ability, yet Miami falls off the chart with regards to mass transit. This is telling as many cities may be strong in one or two areas of mobility but few are strong for all three metrics

Since we are both familiar with Boston, we looked at it as a case study. Boston ranks well in all 3 metrics!

Also, while its population has grown over the last decades, its emissions per capita have gone down. Boston is a leading example of a city adapting to and addressing climate change.

Walkability

One thing that makes Boston work is its distinct neighborhoods, which relate to walkability. Boston is a very walkable city including in the city center, along the Charles River to neighborhoods further out, such as Franklin Park. Alison has walked to the waterfront from her house in a few meandering hours.

Biking Ability

Boston also has numerous bike paths and dedicated and protected bike lanes alongside vehicular traffic. There is a bike sharing program in the city and there are bike clubs and organizations promoting this green form of mobility. The bike path near Alison goes into the city center and can be quite busy during rush hour.

Members of Bikes Not Bombs, an organization that promotes bicycle use and policies throughout Boston, and globally.

Mass Transit

Most neighborhoods are also well connected by mass transit. Boston has subways, tram lines, bus lines with capacity to carry bicycles, commuter trains to other cities as well as urban ferries connecting other communities to downtown Boston

Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogata Columbia, points out that public transit is very much a social justice issue when saying “An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but where even the rich use public transit.”

Boston Timeline

Boston is one of the oldest as far as post-colonial American cities go, and many of its Colonial-era structures still remain.

It has experienced waves of growth since its founding with the burgeoning of the Financial District in the 50s to the 70s then the redevelopment of the Fort Point Channel area in the 80s and 90s and the explosion of build along the waterfront in the Seaport district into the 2000s.

Part of this has led us to more green space.

Boston’s green network balances the natural with the manmade in the city from the Rose Kennedy Greenway in the heart of downtown, to the green belt down Commonwealth Avenue, Boston Public Garden, Olmstead’s Emerald Necklace, and several neighborhood public gardening areas.

Boston's water systems are exemplary: we have seafront, the Charles River, the Boston Garden Duck Pond, and the Emerald Necklace (Olmstead’s series of connected green and water ways) including Alison's favorite, Jamaica Pond.

Boston Water Systems of the Future

Furthermore, with climate change causing a rise in sea level, Boston architects, engineers, city officials and sustainability consultants have been proactive in proposing ideas for dealing with it in hopes of increasing Boston’s resiliency to climate change. One proposal is to create canals an idea, which Alison loves! The Dutch have relied on canals as part of Amsterdam’s resiliency for centuries.

An Exercise in Reading Boston

Alison has brought students into the city for a few classes. This exercise for from a class called Mapping Meaning she taught with colleague Doug Healy (History teacher and urban planning buff) which was very much about how humans read, interpret, depict, and tell stories about the world we interact with.

In a project called How Do You Go?, students were asked to take the same journey twice: once on foot, once via another faster form of transit (bike, skateboard, car, bus, etc.)

The focus was on using one’s own body as an information gathering device.

Then students had to create two maps about the two journeys, but also about the space between the two journeys: how do you portray the differences?

Below is Jordan’s project, which includes points of memory, eye contact, and smell. The experience goes beyond getting from point A to B, and the time it takes to get there.

For the same project, student Mark walked and the rode one branch of the Green Line of the MBTA.

He had both larger and more focused observations. One of his comments about the big view: “Coasting along a track or a route doesn’t place you in the city; rather you only glide over it. Travelling by foot forces you to be present in your surroundings…It lets you pop all the bubbles and see how the city actually fits together”

In another comment, Mark showed a more focused view while walking “Oddly quiet here. Just dropped my glasses in the snow.”

Left: Coleman’s map focused on the sound levels on different modes of transit

Walk = blue; darker and bigger = louder/ smaller lighter = quieter

Drive-red line: higher louder, lower quieter

Right: Niko focused on documenting crossings; here you see the walking side of his journey via crosswalks

The students didn’t just observe the city, but put themselves and their bodies in relation to the city. Ultimately any built space does this, it’s just learning to notice it.

Sustainable City Project

Gail, along with her husband, also an architect, Robert Karn, led a program on creating sustainable cities with students at an independent school in Western Massachusetts. This was a one-week project with high school students, where the class was broken into four teams.

Each student is given a sugar cube which represents the median house size in America, 2000 square feet, for a family of four. Each student is also given a green square of paper and a blue square of paper, sized at the scale of the sugar cube, represent the amount of land to feed the family of four, and the amount of water a family of four consumes.

Students are then given 10 cubes to create a neighborhood with 10 pieces of blue paper and 10 pieces of green paper. Then the sugar cube represents a change of scale from one household to ten households, and it continues to magnify until many cubes represent a city of upwards of 10,000 citizens. The resources, represented by the blue and green paper, also grows in scale matching the sugar cubes. The cubes are then arranged to form an urban-pattern, and additional materials are added to represent forms of urban mobility. The individual needs now need to be thought of as systems, to support the population of the city as a whole.

So, how can you use this in your classroom? Some starting ideas are:

Get OUT into city; use it as a lab…it can address ALL subject matters, and gets student to look at in new way
Learn to read your OWN city, who does it work for, who does it NOT work for
Get students to check assumptions about their own culture by investigating the who, how, and why behind designs of all kinds (not just objects, but systems)
Question service programs…maybe it’s about serving our own students by teaching them to learn from other cultures, to see what a culture’s knowledge has to offer
Think about the person something is designed for AND check the idea that the designer knows what is best for someone else
Reinvent what it means to collaborate

And it doesn't have to be Amsterdam or Rome, or a large city at all. It can be part of a city, a neighborhood, or small town, or anywhere with a built environment. It’s about the built environment, where people interface with natural and built space, and try to make it a more livable and sustainable space.