This week's thread

The past few days I have been doing some digital grunt work; scanning a couple hundred pages (and assorted inserted documents) from the 1917-1934 Afton Board of Education minutes. It is a nicely disciplined task ... for posterity.

There is an enterprising stretch in there when an ACS building project added a gym, auditorium, and plumbing (1927), and then the consolidation of over a dozen one-room school house into the central school along with the purchase of the first fleet of four buses (1932). Difficult not to stop an read the entries while trying move through them.

Then last night, my brother links me to a video about the construction of Hoover Dam (1931-1936) where the word enterprising finds its ultimate example; the sheer vision, moxy, and brawn of American know-how and industry carving out an icon to modernity.

And I guess I'm wondering if Afton's own modest climb into the 1930s wasn't just another reflection of a country and a time coming into its own.

Fly-Thru

The architects for our next school building project sent along some fly-thru videos of their proposals. It brought to mind the fly-overs Middle School students created in the library with SketchUp back in 2013 or so. #proud

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Books about bridges, and bridges.

Building on student effort

 Built a display around a floor-plan drawing on graph paper that a student made on his own: architecture books, contracting how-tos, career titles, plugs for SketchUp and Homestyler, a Frank Lloyd Wright classic from Picturing America, and Architectural Record mags.

P.S. So this morning I show the young man the display, and he goes right over and fires up Homestyler to commence translating his sketch to a digital format...and so that I could watch!

The space we teach in

The recent Chronicle of Higher Education had an article about Oregon State University's efforts to to design effective large-scale lecture space. What I enjoyed most was how the planning team looked beyond academic settings for inspiration, including "fashion runways, nightclubs, club lounges, government buildings, and sports arenas." The design firm also used "proxemics, the study of human spatial requiremnts which shows that students learn better when they are closer to the professor."

Good brainstorming and planning pointers as I consider my "what ifs."

The freedom of a square

The April 7th issue of the New York Review of Books has an article by Michael Kimmelman entitled, " The Craving for Public Squares." It is one of those insightful two-pagers by someone who both notices the world and writes well enough to link us to it. It is part meditation on the subject and part historical perspective. He had me when he wrote,

Squares reaffirm our commonality, our shared sense of place, and our desire to be included. "It's why we congregate near the kitchen at a dinner party instead of the living room," is how Andy Wiley-Schwatrz, who directed the plaza program during the Bloomberg administration, described to me the attraction of the square. "That's where you see people coming and going to the fridge to grab a beer and watch stuff happen.

Common Core Knowledge Products, Circa 1994

I love this stuff: infrastructure!

NYC steam!

Makerspace Bridge

The Tech class that makes toothpick bridges each year has moved on. A couple of those kids and I made this model in the library.

Looking to span some disciplines

Some during-school/after-school makers are foraging materials to make a suspension bridge in our Makerspace. There is time to measure, re-measure, re-do, and re-think here for well-crafted, creative solutions.

Project Cluster demo

Meant to embed this back in November:

Creating meaning

I saw this

and this

and made this.

Please give me a crack at making your awesome lesson plans even one step more meaningful for students.

DPL

This just in: the Denver Public Library is cool!

Plus, they use vintage as well as breaking technology to get the job done!

Thanks for the report, RAD. Watcha readin'?

Periodical lessons

Our library subscribes to Architectural Record because it is a bastion of process, attention to detail, creativity, collaboration, and diversity of professions; good stuff to rub off on students and teachers.  It often, both subtly and sometimes gratuitously, refers to historical precedent. I especially liked this article on a recently designed Quaker meeting house; a lesson how modernism might accommodate tradition while honoring both.

Student-Directed Ideas (SDI), #1

1998

2012

From the archives

Back in the 1990s I collaborated with sixth grade teachers on a Medieval unit. I played the "master" guild artist to groups of sixth grade "apprentices."

As stone workers, we created the centerings and then the arches for a cathedral's flying buttresses.

Students posed for a master "cartoon" which we transferred as stained glass window tracery; coloring our window with tissue paper.

As sculptors, we created a life-size gargoyle with duct tape and perched it on the school roof overlooking the entrance.

You gotta love it

The parking garage at the Kansas City Public Library.

Why I read

One of the reasons I read is because when an author has such clarity of thoughts and words, it helps to forge new relationships I might have missed through an entire lifetime.

This article by architecture critc Michael Kimmelman makes that leap for me. He uses the "Occupy Wall Street" movement as an example of we ,"tend to underestimate the political power of physical places." Along the way, his observations, his insights, his perspective from outside the moment as well as from within it create a lucid awareness that might otherwise have escaped me.

These are probably too many excerpts (read the article!), but I can't help it:

Kent State, Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall: we clearly use locales, edifices, architecture to house our memories and political energy. Politics troubles our consciences. But places haunt our imaginations. So we check in on Facebook and Twitter, but make pilgrimages to Antietam, Auschwitz and to the Acropolis, to gaze at rubble from the days of Pericles and Aristotle.

I thought of Aristotle, of all people, while I watched the Zuccotti Park demonstrators hold one of their “general assemblies” the other day. In his “Politics,” Aristotle argued that the size of an ideal polis extended to the limits of a herald’s cry. He believed that the human voice was directly linked to civic order. A healthy citizenry in a proper city required face-to-face conversation.

It so happens that near the start of the protest, when the police banned megaphones at Zuccotti Park, they obliged demonstrators to come up with an alternative. “Mic checks” became the consensus method of circulating announcements, spread through the crowd by people repeating, phrase by phrase, what a speaker had said to others around them, compelling everyone, as it were, to speak in one voice. It’s like the old game of telephone, and it is painstakingly slow.

“But so is democracy,” as Jay Gaussoin, a 46-year-old unemployed actor and carpenter, put it to me. “We’re so distracted these days, people have forgotten how to focus. But the ‘mic check’ demands not just that we listen to other people’s opinions but that we really hear what they’re saying because we have to repeat their words exactly.

“It requires an architecture of consciousness,” was Mr. Gaussoin’s apt phrase."

_______

“We come to get a sense of being part of a larger community,” said Brian Pickett, a 33-year-old adjunct professor of theater and speech at City University of New York. I found him sitting last week among the neat, tarpaulin-covered stacks of sleeping bags in one corner of the park. “It’s important to see this in the context of alienation today. We do Facebook alone. But people are not alone here.”


And as a result, demonstrators also reveal themselves to each other. Egyptians described this phenomenon at Tahrir Square. Tea Partiers have talked about it, too. Protesters don’t just show the world a mass of people. They discover their own numbers — people with similar, if not identical, concerns. Imagine Zuccotti Park, one protester told me, as a Venn diagram of characters representing disparate political and economic disenchantments. The park is where their grievances overlap. It’s literally common ground.

Senior challenge

Before we implement our policy for distributing these withdrawn book, we challenged a group of seniors to see if they could construct an arch tall enough for me to walk underneath. We'll keep you posted.

They did it!
Congratulations Corey, Phil, Andy, Jake, Shawn and Mike.

Tape

I used masking tape to identify the the new location of my fiction collection. I got the idea of orienting students with floor-signage from a Japenese library featured in an Architectural Record article.