OSLA Playground

Concept of Learning

The current educational model in the United States is often criticized for being a one-size-fits-all approach involving top-down information dumps and exam-based assessments geared towards getting individuals into college. In teaching obedience and emphasizing information retention, this model creates students, not learners–individuals who act on their own sense of agency to pursue their intellectual interests and desires in manners that suite them.

At the Open Source Learning Academy: Playground, the model we propose to enable the development of learners is based on the notion of open source, whereby a resource–knowledge–is made available to and may be modified and freely redistributed by the network’s participants. Furthermore, this model seeks to reestablish the role of play in learning. While play is often associated with leisure and recreation, its biological context suggests something much different. In nature, play is practiced when, for example, a lion physically engages with her cubs to teach them how to hunt. In this context, play is actually a process that allows for self-discovery and the development life skills in a forgiving climate. It is a process of observation, action, and reflection. Play, in this sense, is not too different from how academic learning ought to occur.

Given this outlook on education, the OSLA: Playground seeks to architecturally provide a solution with distinctly articulated, but highly interconnected, clusters of program in the form of the Observe, Make, and Reflect Cohorts, in conjunction with a series of support spaces. In the Observe Cohort, students start on their educational path of discovery by receiving background information on and prompts related to subjects commonly associated with the common core curriculum: History, English, Math, and Science. From here, they depart to the Make Cohort, where they are to decide how to approach this problem through one of the four design disciplines at the school: Culinary, Product, Organizational, and Media. Upon the completion of the assignment, they are given time to reflect in the Reflect Cohort. Here, they are asked to evaluate their findings and share them. At this point, it is up to the student to decide whether or no further inquiry is needed or whether it is time to take on a new challenge.

To make the vast space comprehensible to its occupants, the clusters of program adhere to a pentagonal grid, referred to as a geometry setout. Furthermore, the school’s central means of circulation seek to indiscriminately promote access between all areas of interest. Within the clusters, one will notice the use of non-traditional architectural partitions, including rotatable walls, split-level floor schemes, and flexible furniture, to create micro-spaces. With this environment facilitating our unorthodox curriculum, we hope to cultivate an innate sense of curiosity within and foster the growth of learners.

The Big Picture

Based on a tessellation of pentagons, our the Open Source Learning Academy relies heavily on the system that the resulting geometry provides. The geometry helps to define clusters and boundaries of program. It helps to delineate exterior spaces. It dictates the underlying structural system. All this and other geometrically driven considerations come together to produce the aesthetic and spatial qualities of the OSLA.

Sizing-Setup-Model

Navigation

The journey into the OSLA begins at the southern entrance where pedestrians are brought into a courtyard from the drop-off zone or adjacent parking lot. From here, they are greeted with an extensive atrium at the core of the building that serves as the circulatory spine of the building. A ramp and stair provide access from the ground to upper floors. As users ascend, they are progressively drawn backwards and up the hillside towards the rear.

At the micro-scale, there exist split level floors in several cohorts. They serve as transparent buffers between zones of activity and zones that require isolation. To connect users from one to the other, occupiable ramps that bisect the space in accordance to the geometry setout are employed.

HVAC

The HVAC systems within the OSLA Playground include mostly radiant systems. A large basement underneath the surface houses the main water supply, cistern which is connected to the filter, boiler and chiller to be distributed throughout the building. Radiant heated floors and chilled beams utilize the radiant heating and cooling effects of tubes embedded within the floor plates or hung below the structure. Ventilation is mostly passive as the windows allow for operability where fresh air is necessary. Supplemental air supply and return is accounted for in the culinary and product design lab. Roof top AHUs service these spaces. The geometry set out in combination with the egress towers created a small wedge shaped space in plan to be used as the vertical chases for the systems distribution.

Primary Structure

As referenced above, the geometry setout is the primary driver behind virtually every aspect of the building, large or small. The structural framing of the building is no exception. Taking the pentagonal and hexagonal grids from the setout, we proceeded to bisect them in an effort to no only create reasonable spans with our steel members, but also create habitable spaces at the same time.

Cladding

With the desire to glaze much of our envelope, we had to find a way to mitigate heat and solar gain. The vertical louver proved to be an adaptable unit, capable of rotations that allowed for the selective metering of sunlight and views. With the gentle twist that we employed, the relatively static facade became something a bit more playful as it began to convey a sense of movement.

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