the sublime

Rethinking the School Building

The following pages are from my pre-thesis booklet. They illustrate the issues with the current logic behind school programming based purely on a segregated-by-subject organization.

Site Photos

Menomonee Valley - Milwaukee, WI

Pre-thesis Abstract

I see the world as a framework for exploration. I wish to create architecture that enables people to meaningfully experience this framework.

ensemble - explore

A proposal for thesis study

Paul Mattek

April 14, 2009

I propose the design of an educational hub for 10-14 year old students based on exploration of place. The school proposes to assemble an ensemble of educational, socio-communal, technological, mobile, and ecological networks in order to deliver knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge to each student.

Imagine a school where traveling classrooms deliver students to their education, allowing travel time to be lecture and discussion time, and return to a central hub where students apply knowledge gained on the trip by working on a trip-inspired project.

Imagine in addition to school buses, schools operate train coaches that are elements of a larger transit system. That transit system operates on a variable schedule flexible enough to allow education and learning even during travel time. The school day schedule correspondingly allows more flexibility. Teachers and students are able to plug time of learning, and destination if necessary, into a framework that allows them to access learning when and where it exists, rather than relying on a fixed schedule, worrying about scheduling conflicts, or scheduling and reservation of another mode of transportation.

Imagine a neighborhood that sees harnessing its childrens’ education as a necessary activity for anticipating the future needs of the community. Imagine a community’s history and culture come to life over and over as its children, teachers, and parents explore the bundle of learning relationships embedded within the community. Image a specific identity and aesthetic emerge as students return from their trips bearing new knowledge to be articulated and artifacts to be researched.

Imagine the school building transform. Imagine a school that looks not like a school, but a playful extension of the education taking place, and of the community in which it dwells. It is a hub of many destinations, and an exhibition space of activity whose activity and aesthetic clearly express the desires of that community and its youth. Learning opportunities exist incessantly as students, teachers, and community members alike deliver new knowledge to the place, and explore the place itself, to find new knowledge and develop new applications of that knowledge.

The resultant school building might itself be referred to as an ensemble. Rather than existing as a school placed on a site, it will exist as a new framework that emerged from a multivariate field of networks. This project proposes that this ensemble of fields delivers an educational experience to each student that supplies and develops the tools to understand, and take ownership in, the framework of their world.

Based on trends, ideals, and concerns already at work in the present time (and covered in detail below), this project proposes this vision of future education.

The students

No school can be considered relevant that does not know who its user is, or what that user needs. The 10-14 year old age group has been chosen as the user for this school for a number of reasons. This age range is the key time in human life when the human brain is the most capable of developing critical thinking skills, social-relational skills, and is the most open to exploration-based learning.[i] These skills are vital for any citizen of any place. They are especially relevant in a society and economy that is becoming ever more transient and volatile, and especially critical in a democracy, where politics and daily life are so closely intertwined.[ii] There seems to be ample evidence that waiting until high school, let alone college or one’s first job, to teach these skills handicaps a child’s development and readiness for active life in a democracy. If they do not learn these skills early in life, it seems they are permanently handicapped from possessing what William James called a “living understanding of the movement of reality.”[iii]

Educational ideals

Exploration has been the buzz word since the beginnings of the contemporary Middle School movement in the 1950’s, and now is no different. In fact, an “integrated, project-oriented curriculum that would permit young adolescents to explore the world around them, making connections between the different kinds of subject matter that most junior high curriculums had treated as distinct and separate”[iv] and a curriculum that would emphasize “guidance and exploration, independence and responsibility… based on the characteristics of young adolescents and concerned with all aspects of growth and development” was the driving force behind the first middle school movement in the 1910s and 1920s.[v]

Modern advancement in theory and research supports these principles of education. Multiple Intelligences Theory and Adolescent Social Theory posit that educating students in a classroom where they learn through lecture and discussion alone fails to maximize the learning potential of most students. Just considering how the internet has added another dimension to students’ ability to self-direct learning gives us reason to consider modes of education other than classroom-based education.[vi]

Especially relevant in this regard is the renewed interest in the theory that arrived about the same time as the first middle schools: Pragmatism. This philosophy based primarily on one’s present experience offers a fertile field for teaching students to explore knowledge on their own. Instead of focusing on the action of, or relying on the instruction of, the teacher, students can be allowed to have agency of their own. They can access knowledge spontaneously when given the framework in which to do so. Having this spontaneous access, a child’s mind can be better able to explore the world via a very powerful tool: imagination.

[Imagination] designates a quality that animates and pervades all processes of making and observation. It is a way of seeing and feeling thinks as they compose an integral whole. It is the large and generous blending of interests at the point where the mind comes in contact with the world. When old and familiar things are made new in experience, there is imagination. When the new is created, the far and strange become the most natural inevitable things in the world. There is always some measure of adventure in the meeting of mind and universe, and this adventure is, in its measure, imagination.[vii]

As 10-14 year old students are still young people in the making (just ask any parent), so the education that most affects them is that education that allows them to take hold, via the rich processes of imagination, of the making of their education. Imagination is the “interstitial space” between stimulus and response in which students can draw lines between disparate elements of information, make new connections, and actually know something.[viii] According to David Lapoujade, “to know is to traverse the relations that permeate experience.”[ix]

Local community

This thesis project proposes to expand, via an exploration-based middle school, the cultural identity and aesthetic of place from the Southside community of Milwaukee into the Menomonee Valley. The Menomonee Valley is a place that is currently only a loose conglomeration of several fading, mainly industrial, identities. It can be seen as a tabula that will soon be rasa of its past identities. There are redevelopment plans under way that plop items non-specific to place on the landscape in an effort to create a new identity. This thinking takes items that are foreign to the local setting, and imposes them on the valley, assuming that there is nothing in the valley or nearby, that can offer any value to the recreation of a valley identity. Adjacent the south end of the 27^th Street Viaduct however, there exists a community, whose people and culture is incredibly valuable to the redevelopment of the valley. The Menomonee Valley offers a “non-precious space”[x] that is available for exploration, experimentation, and the creation of a new and meaningful identity for the Valley, and an expanded identity of the Southside community.

The community just south the Menomonee Valley has a great need for a school more integrated with community. These neighborhoods have a strong sense of Latino community, but some of the lowest performing schools in the city, state, even country. The 2008 high school graduation rate was less than 50%.[xi] On the other hand, within this community dwell local experts with pragmatic specialties: grandparents, parents, artisans, business owners, etc. These community-based individuals are well-equipped to not only support education fiscally (such as through taxes), but also personally through direct instruction and display of work. This project further proposes to forecast the reconnection of these south side neighborhoods to the valley by placing the school within the valley, and not within the existing community. Just like the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design anticipated the revival of the 3^rd Ward and Alterra the revival of the Lakefront and Riverwest community, so this school will anticipate the needs of this community to expand and reinvigorate its adjacent territory.

Technology

The origin of the word technology comes from the Greek teknh(tek-nay). The Greeks of the Classical Era would only use this word to refer to someone who had achieved both a mental and operational mastery of a skill useful to society. Technology harnessed facilitates the development of the brain and/or body (i.e. the teknh) of each student. Digital technology can add speed to a student’s acquisition of knowledge by performing certain tasks and delivering global expertise and communication via the internet, but cannot be the sole interface between student and knowledge. An actual application of knowledge (i.e. a skill) based in space and real (not virtual) time, such as dialoging with peers or conducting field studies or playing music and sports or fabricating art, is necessary. This is the technology of place. The richer, more meaningful interface between student and technology of place achieves the teknh of ancient Greece. It achieves a mindful and sensory stimulating education necessary for students to practice the skills useful to our society. This direct application of knowledge seems a better fit for a democratic society than a simple following of a standardized curriculum using standard tools and technology that only fits that one type of curriculum. A school that allows face to face interaction and uses many tools in many ways will inevitably have conflict over the best ideas and how best to use its tools, but the fact that this conflict can occur is what drives a democratic society. Political philosopher Chantal Mouffe calls this conflict “agonistic struggle.” She considers it to be the “very condition of a vibrant democratic life.”[xii] Technology used in a way that facilitates debate, struggle, and conflict will ultimately also lead to resolutions, progress, and by the way, students who are more informed and involved in the struggles of our democratic society.

Mobility

A contemporary buzzword in educational circles is flexibility. Currently, this thinking in spatial terms only affects the interior of an existing school building shell, or a subtle re-arrangement of its programmatic pieces. Moveable partitions and book and computer carts are a step in the right direction, and field trips have always been a viable option, but the underlying assumption of the school building as a rigid box seems to hold back any further progress. This is where a study of trends in mobility can be fruitful. What if the entire idea of schooling was centered around field trips? What if the school existed only as a place to practice and assemble the knowledge and experience gained during travel to various destinations? One can imagine, and many have predicted, the emergence of a more customizable mass-transit system. If this system can exist, so can a school that is an integral part of it. Writer, conceptual artist, and musician Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid) sees the relationship between learning and the mobile urban condition in a similar way:

Railways, airports, information centers, public performance spaces, internet and world wide web access points all point to a dispersion of the previously fixed rules about architecture and presence, architecture and cultural production. A new cartography emerges from the interplay among these complex variables to form a kind of hyper-agora as we move easily through intersecting subway, rail, and airline terminals and the streets making up the 21^st century urban context. Envision the analytic skills to navigate the terrain and conceptualize at the mega and micro scale. Engage them with an ability to think synthetically – or perhaps one should say syncretically. Each building and architectural space becomes a different vision of a hypothetical cultural and economic nexus made real.[xiii]

Any school that wishes to participate in this urban condition, this “hyper-agora,” must also facilitate mobility.

Ecology

This thesis project proposes to responsibly incorporate elements of the physical world into learning networks and environments. This task involves looking at the educational and ecological value of every chosen material and built environment within the educational community: the material eco-face. Additionally, the inherent properties of every material offer another scale of study for inspiration and tectonic study. The Menomonee Valley seems an especially rich landscape in this regard. The science of river ecology and bio-remediation, the physics of movement, the ecological implications of air-quality and industry, the acoustics of an increasingly dense urban fabric, among other topics, can confront students on a short walk or train ride. In line with the educational ideals put forth earlier, material exploration affords incessant learning opportunities.

The way I’ve seen it

This project stems from my own experience. I have arrived in an architecture school only after spending most of my life going 180° in the wrong direction. Growing up , there was no place I would rather be than playing in my backyard, learning how to use the tools in my father’s workshop, or exploring my grandfather’s collection of stuff amassed over a 70 year life, and stored in his vacant dairy barn. I dreaded most hours of learning in school. It was impossible to me that anyone actually liked learning this way. But when it came time for me to go to college, I continued along the traditional trajectory of classroom-based education. I taught high-school English for a few years, and actually did enjoy it – but could never get over the feeling that I was torturing the vast majority of students. My desire for this project is to conceive of a learning environment that works better for those people who share my experience. I know there are many. In his book Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years, futurist Bruce Sterling writes:

My older daughter is a student in high school…she lives in harsh paramilitary constraint. She has a dress code. She fills out permission forms and tardy slips, stands in lines, eats in a vast barracks mess room. She comes and goes at the jangle of a bell, surrounded by hall monitors. …My child leads a narrow, tough, archaic working life. Though she isn’t paid for her efforts, she’d do pretty well as a gung-ho forties-era Rosie the Riveter…

Today’s schoolchildren are held to grueling nineteenth-century standards. Today’s successful adults learn constantly, endlessly developing skills and moving from temporary phase to phase, much like preschoolers. Children are in training for stable roles in large, paternalistic bureaucracies. These enterprises no longer exist for their parents… Today’s young students are being civilized for an older civilization that their own…

It’s no coincidence that my daughter is appalled by her schoolwork but thrilled by the Internet. Loathing her official school assignments, she spends hours tracking down arcana on the Net, in patient orgies of pop-culture research.[xiv]

It is the aim of this project to engage students, to produce students who are not just advocates of a learned methodology, but agents offering their own expertise and points of view, students who can clearly articulate nuances within and connections between different sources of learning and experience, not just illustrate the work of others, students with a first-hand understanding of how their world works, and how their education fits into their world.

---

[i] Merritt, Edwin T., James A. Beudin, and Richard S. Myler. Middle School of the Future : A Focus on Exploration. New York: Scarecrow P, Incorporated, 2004, pp. XV-XVIII.

[ii] Alexis de Tocqueville is quoted as expressing this thought in an essay by Nadia Urbinati for The Pragmatist Imagination. Tocqueville’s thought is blantantly anti-democracy, but still bears relevance to the idea that democracy is what its people make it. In this educational application, critical thinking and social skills seem especially democratic.

[iii] William James, “Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism,” in a Pluralistic Iniverse (1909).

[iv] Merritt, Edwin T., James A. Beudin, and Richard S. Myler. Middle School of the Future : A Focus on Exploration. New York: Scarecrow P, Incorporated, 2004, p. XXX.

[v] George, Paul S., Chris Stevenson, Julia Thomason, and James Beane. 1992. The Middle School – and Beyond. Alexandria, VA.: Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development, p.3.

[vi] Merritt, Edwin T., James A. Beudin, and Richard S. Myler. Middle School of the Future : A Focus on Exploration. New York: Scarecrow P, Incorporated, 2004, p. XVI.

[vii] John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934).

[viii] John Rajchman, essay for The Pragmatist Imagiantion (2000).

[ix] Ockman, Joan. The Pragmatist Imagination. Princeton Architectural Press. New York:2000. P.54.

[x] Merritt, Edwin T., James A. Beudin, and Richard S. Myler. Middle School of the Future : A Focus on Exploration. New York: Scarecrow P, Incorporated, 2004, p. XXX. The term used here is directly connected to the curricular ideals of the middle school. The author posits that space devoid of an intention is necessary for students to freely explore the intentions of their imaginations.

[xi] www.gis.milwaukee.gov

[xii] Ockman, Joan. The Pragmatist Imagination. Princeton Architectural Press. New York:2000. P.68.

[xiii] Ockman, Joan. The Pragmatist Imagination. Princeton Architectural Press. New York:2000. P.131.

[xiv] Sterling, Bruce. Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002, pp.42-44.