<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Thanks for posting these provocative questions, Noah. For the past ten years or so my own work has focused on libraries -- an institution, like the university, that has been fighting (successfully, in many cases) to claim is place in an ever-evolving cultural, political, and socio-economic climate. I've especially enjoyed thinking about the spaces in which these institutions are housed -- the places that make manifest who they are and what they do. Libraries, in thinking about library design, have grappled with many of the issues you've identified in your post, Noah: how to leave behind a modular (and often Brutalist) past; how to accommodate new ways of learning, new ways of accessing and using media, new models of service; how to blend the physical and digital; how to program a space for an institution whose mission, social function, audiences, etc., are evolving. <div><br></div><div>Remodeling a library, or moving into a new space, or designing one from scratch, provides a great opportunity to figure out how to give "form" to identity...or ideology...or pedagogy. The same goes for schools. </div><div><br></div><div>Some recent educational spaces that have been grabbing attention include the Fumihiko Makis' new <a href="http://www.media.mit.edu/about/building">MIT Media Lab</a> (<a href="http://www.media.mit.edu/about/building">http://www.media.mit.edu/about/building</a>), which uses the old "transparency equals openness" (or "freedom" or "collaboration") trope. At the same time, as Metropolis's Karrie Jacobs points out, "many of the labs have names befitting ballparks: the MasterCard Lab for
Future Transactions, the Motorola Innovation Lab. Other unnamed labs
are awaiting sponsorship." Then there's SANAA's <a href="http://www.rolexlearningcenter.ch/">Rolex Learning Center</a> (<a href="http://www.rolexlearningcenter.ch/">http://www.rolexlearningcenter.ch/</a>), a huge slice of Swiss cheese spread out on Swiss soil: its undulating rhythms supposedly create zones of varying character, while its open floorplans (predictably) promote fluidity and (of course), cross-disciplinary collaboration. It's the same metaphors all the time! <a href="http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/9/view/9197/sanaa-rolex-learning-center.html">Design Boom</a> (<a href="http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/9/view/9197/sanaa-rolex-learning-center.html">http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/9/view/9197/sanaa-rolex-learning-center.html</a>) reports: "It offers flexibility to use the building in many different ways, now and in the future, to absorb new technology and working methods, as they come on stream, many of them developed within EPFL itself. The building emphasises sociability,
getting together for coffee, for lunch, for study, for seminars, to
stimulate informal encounters between people of all the key
disciplines." </div><div><br></div><div>At the opposite end of the spectrum from these big-budget, big-design projects are the more DIY proposals that emerged from the Open Architecture Forum's <a href="http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/competitions/challenge/2009">Classroom challenge</a> (<a href="http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/competitions/challenge/2009">http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/competitions/challenge/2009</a>). The projects range from subterranean school/community centers for migrant salt-pan workers in India to a "zero technology" bamboo school in central Nepal. Given that many of these proposals were intended for "off the grid" locations, it is not at all surprising that media and IT were very rarely mentioned (even through project participants were provided with resources related to IT in education). In an environment where there is "no water feeding, no power supply, insufficient fuel resources and no palpable prospect of improvement," free computers, I hope we'll agree, are not the solution. </div><div><br></div><div>Plug-in-ability -- of the architectural kind -- was, however, a recurring theme among the proposals. One project advocates for a "Portable Educationally Adaptive Product of Design, the PeaPoD"; while promotes the use of "mobile, self-contained educational modules" in an abandoned car factory in Indianapolis. There are of course historical examples of adaptive and plug-in architecture, including Archigram's Plug-In City and its extension, the <a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%253AAD%253AE%253A6950&page_number=4&template_id=1&sort_order=1">Plug-In University Node</a>. Junya Ishigami's Kanagawa <a href="http://www.archdaily.com/67294/update-kanagawa-institute-of-technology-workshop-junya-ishigami/">Institute of Technology Workshop</a> might not have moving components, but it does allow for the creation of flexible zones; its randomly distributed columns can be grouped and regrouped into dynamic nodes of activity. </div><div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Thinking about the *places* of learning -- from corporate-sponsored media labs to grass huts to blended learning spaces -- can force us to literally de-construct the institutional architecture of education, and then build new spaces that give shape to a more responsive, more relevant, more functional institution. </div><div><br></div><div>Shannon Mattern</div><div>The New School</div><div><a href="http://www.wordsinspace.net">www.wordsinspace.net</a></div><div><div><br></div><div><br><div><br></div><div><br><div><div><div>On Jul 22, 2010, at 8:00 AM, <a href="mailto:idc-request@mailman.thing.net">idc-request@mailman.thing.net</a> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>Send iDC mailing list submissions to<br><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><a href="mailto:idc@mailman.thing.net">idc@mailman.thing.net</a><br><br>To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit<br><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc<br>or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to<br><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>idc-request@mailman.thing.net<br><br>You can reach the person managing the list at<br><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>idc-owner@mailman.thing.net<br><br>When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific<br>than "Re: Contents of iDC digest..."<br><br><br>Today's Topics:<br><br> 1. Information Architecture? (noah brehmer)<br><br><br>----------------------------------------------------------------------<br><br>Message: 1<br>Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 23:12:03 -0400<br>From: noah brehmer <noah.brehmer@gmail.com><br>Subject: [iDC] Information Architecture?<br>To: idc@mailman.thing.net<br>Message-ID: <5E4B094B-BDDC-4D44-A454-79DF99226A47@gmail.com><br>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"<br><br>"To reformers, like other middle- and upperclass observers, the manufacturing process was a marvel of rationality, efficacy, and speed. Workers were required to conform to the demands of production, to be prompt, to follow orders, and occasionally to solve problems encountered on the factory floor. In other words, they needed self-discipline and attentiveness, along with deference for authority. Such expectation appealed to the Protestant values of early school reformers. They sought similar goals for children in their institutions, claiming outright in some instances that the duty of the school was to prepare students for the demands of the emerging industrial order. Even as some factory owners pulled children away from schools, many educators emulated the industrial system as a model for their new organizations. It was a powerful metaphor for the future social order."<br><br><br>A great majority of our schools were built under the epistemological dictums of an industrial labor economy. A Fordist economy, characterized by tight divisions of labor, hierarchical chains of command, as well as systematized and linear production/dispersion models. The American school system was designed to accommodate the demands presented by the factory labor environment; emanating the epistemologies supported by this new economy in the physical/symbolic layout of the school. Modular classrooms, brutalist architecture, and a general fixation on the solidification of space are the characterizing traits of the modern school building. <br><br>The physical remainders of the Fordist economy have continued to act as an imposing force, molding the socio-temporal relations within the school under the auspicious of a culture and economy that have passed us. It's a substantial problem and an issue we most face if we are to prepare students for the post-fordist societies they will enviably operate within. My question is what can be done about this? The easy answer of course would involve the popular proposition for E-learning, but I think the most viable solution will involve the facilitation of a learning environment that could support a nexus between a digital and physical ecology. <br><br>With that said, what organization models could effectively integrate the students web-based learning ecology with the students provincial community?<br><br>And given the importance I would suspect the great majority of us place on experiential learning models [consider Ranciere and the great majority of the other progressive education theorist and actors] can we elaborate a built environment that would foster a nexus between the students digital and physical commons?<br><br>I'm thinking of generative architecture, a built-environment that could facilitate transversial+transdisciplinary organizational models. An architecture that would speak to the student of the digital ethos. An architecture that would adapt as we act upon it!<br><br><br>Art School Propositions for the 21st century, Aesthetic Platforms Brendan D. Moran<br><br>p.35 "The educational arena is increasingly comparable to the hardware components within computing, which must not only multitask in support of myriad software applications but that we want to house both efficiently and attractively, within a variety of other contexts. Allowing for infinite possible plug-ins, the seamlessly productive platform of the factory, as in Andy Warhol's exhibitionistic one, facilitates the types of recordings, and transcodings that generate new textures and practices of art production, distribution, consumption, appreciation, and ultimately education for any and all interested comers. The expansive locus of contemporary art education, like any good operating system, needs to provide a flexibility of connections between the arts and, perhaps more important, between art and nonart-especially since the most inventive contemporary work questions assumptions about the clarity of such distinctions."<br><br><br>+ I will follow up this post with an essay I've been working on concerning new institutionalism and the pedagogical turn. I will focus my attention on the work of Marion Von Austen and Irit Rogoff - looking at "reformpause" and Rogoff's Summit project. <br><br>best,<br><br>Noah<br>-------------- next part --------------<br>An HTML attachment was scrubbed...<br>URL: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/attachments/20100721/59c0ecd2/attachment.html <br><br>------------------------------<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>iDC mailing list<br>iDC@mailman.thing.net<br>https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc<br>_______________________________________________<br>Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC) <br>_______________________________________________<br>www.distributedcreativity.org <br>_______________________________________________<br>The research of the Institute for Distributed Creativity <br>(iDC) focuses on collaboration in media art, technology, <br>and theory with an emphasis on social contexts.<br>_______________________________________________<br><br><br>End of iDC Digest, Vol 66, Issue 9<br>**********************************<br></div></blockquote></div><br></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>