The Neighbourhood

Learning Environment

The current university education system in the United States mainly focuses on one thing: to create people who can work. The focus is not on the people and on learning for the sake of learning, but more about how the students can come out as better “employees” and have better chances in the working field. Unfortunately, even the students have gained the same mindset as well. Students now focus more on grades and getting jobs rather than learning. The university has now become a factory to produce workers for today’s society.

We can change this type of focus by changing the environments that students learn in. By designing spaces to act as the Third Teacher puts the focus more on its inhabitants and on the students. The idea of space acting as a Third Teacher is intriguing, but what does that require? How can the environment act as a catalyst to not only instigate people to start learning, but to also continue that passion for learning?

Two fundamental needs that need to be provided for the people to create such an environment is a sense of belonging and a sense of individuality. Spatially, this can be done through the use of two spatial components: homebases and playgrounds.

Home Bases

The common areas for the different families are called homebases. The homebases serve as spaces that are comfortable and ground you down, places where you feel a sense of belonging.

Learning Sources

The playgrounds are organized by three different main focuses which are based on three different sources/approaches to learning: learning with people, with objects, and with information.

Learning Process

The intent of how I imagined the education system would work was that when students first start at this university, they are placed into one of four “families”. Each family has their own homebase and for the first year or two, most of the new students’ times are spent at their own homebases. At the homebases, they receive an education unlike any other, one that is more focused on teaching the students how to create a society. They would learn social skills, collaborative skills, empathy, etc. This would happen through a system of mentorships and through the variety of spaces within the homebases that can create collaborative relationships as well as intimate moments. In a way, it’s similar to learning through play, where you develop skills without intently focused on gaining those skills. It’s almost done without realization! Throughout the school year, events (special moments) also happen where families compete against each other through the development of family projects. The main focus of the home base is for students to gain that sense of belonging.

From the different homebases, students come together to work on proposed projects depending on their own personal interests.  In this way, the communities created through the projects are more diverse. The students take what they learned about creating communities and put it into practice within these project groups. These projects would be proposed by professors, scientists, entrepreneurs, or even “upperclassman” students,  who would then act as facilitator/mentors who guide the project groups throughout the whole process of discovery and learning. The projects groups go through a process to accomplish the goals of their project, using the different playgrounds as open sources for the groups to utilize and make use of. Therefore, the playgrounds don’t act as places to go to learn, but as tools to create places to learn. Through the diverse project groups and the dynamism of work flow and spaces, the students feel more of a sense of individualism as they “play” in the playgrounds. The diversity, the constant flow, and change of spaces and experiences instigates the reflection for students to think about themselves: what they like, what they don’t like, what they’re good at, what they’re bad at, and ultimately, what they can do. I hope that the students come to experience and internal reflection that end up flowing outwards and connecting to society as a whole. To not stop at “What do I want?”, but to go on to “What can I do? Not only for myself, not only for my friends and family, but to others, to the community, to the world outside of the university.

Spatial Interaction

I imagined most of my spaces to be of an open floor plan where there is a continual flow between spaces and program spilling out of their cores. The two organizational tools to keep this kind of environment from going too crazy would be the homebases and the intentional circulation.

Design Approach?

Theoretically, I really wanted the design to work with a mix between bottom-top and top-down approach. I thought that I would focus on the overall main concepts and themes and get them solidified, but then instead of getting into a mode of “zooming in” from there, I thought that these ideas would grow into elements of small spaces to experiential qualities to large collaborative/community spaces to the building to the form/facade/envelope to its connection to the site, etc.

Reflection

Unfortunately, I have to say that developing my concepts and ideas took longer than expected. The process was fun, but overloaded. There were so many elements to the design that I never knew when to stop. I was blinded. It wasn’t until I was giving my final review that I was thinking, “Ah, I should have stopped earlier.” There were so many things that I had figured out, but so many of those things weren’t really necessary to the architectural design process.

For the next quarter, I’m excited. I want to not focus on what I did this quarter and start off with a blank slate. I want this kind of approach because no matter how much I try to clear my mind, I won’t be able to do it completely. Remnants will remain. I’m just hoping that what will remain in the back of my head after this “cleansing” of my ideas will be the essentials, the things that I find to be the most important ideas/concepts. So, in a way, I’m not completely throwing everything that I did for Winter Quarter away. Instead, I’m just trying not to think about it too much.

This post has 1 Comment

  1. cabrinharch on March 26, 2017 at 9:53 pm Reply

    Very thoughtful expression of how this place could work – perhaps more developed as an idea than in physical form. I suspect, and gather from your reflection above, that perhaps you had so many ideas in your head, you began to convince yourself that they existed in the project; but in reality the initial diagram is there and is fantastic, you never actually got into the project. This is really evident in the section which is not spatial at all. This is the hard work of really testing out your conceptual ideas in physical form and spatial sequences which is always far far harder than you think. Your early models were more successful, needing several degrees deeper of spatial development. Please take that into consideration as we move into Spring quarter. A lot of intelligence in your reflection – such as realizing that you are never really starting over, and even if you try to start with a blank slate you already have many strong ideas that will continue to influence you.

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