Students will create a drawing from a written description and examine and discuss how European artists from the past created images of China that combined imagination with written descriptions and limited visual imagery.
This studio proposes to engage tectonics as a material process. By exploring transformation, indeterminacy and mutability inherent in material and landscape processes, students will be challenged to engage notions of duration as a design strategy for architecture and urbanism. While the second law of thermodynamics states that the material universe tends toward a state of increasing disorder, architects build and construct in opposition to these forces. Attempting to delay the processes of disorder, decay and collapse, tectonics is often seen as the embodied expression of an arrested moment-the finite resolution of the building process. Yet the processes that enable and disable architecture extend beyond any arrested moment. While the design of materials is not new, the recent evolution of mutant materials and fabrication technologies has created a material culture pregnant with possibilities. Plastics can be endowed with the properties of glass, wood made to appear like fabric, and foams given the power of memory. Materials and their methods are multiplying while our inherited notions of material significance and signification are increasingly challenged. 'Truth' in materials or in their methods of construction is no longer (and arguably never was) an absolute concept. Highlighting the multiple states of materials (raw, finished, decomposed) and new methods for fabrication (CAD-CAM, CNC, rapid prototyping), this studio seeks to understand the processes that form, deform and ultimately dematerialize built matter. This studio will explore the limits of materiality and immateriality to engage a tectonics of temporal change, transformation, and succession. Materials will be treated, not merely as finishes, but as critical points of departure for investigating new spatial possibilities. Students will design and fabricate full scale material constructs in order to explore a material's inherent properties. Investigations of casting, stressing, weathering, eroding, corroding, etc. will be part of the design process. Students will translate these studies into critical architectural propositions for the Stearn's Quarry site in Chicago. Dating back 400 million years, the site was once a part of an ancient reef near the equator before the shift in the North American tectonic plate. Rich in calcium carbonate, the 23 acre Stearns quarry site was excavated from 1936 to 1970 to a depth of 350 feet. Located within Chicago's city grid, the quarry supplied the dolomite used to line the cities waterways and yielded an unprecedented amount of fossils from the Silurian Age. Since 1970 the quarry has been used as a dumping site for incinerator ash, and construction debris. Designated a 'Superfund Site' due to concerns over its toxicity, the city of Chicago is currently examining the reprogramming, reuse and reclamation of the site. Students will design a series of architectural interventions and public interfaces to enable, support and house the geological and ecological processes and artifacts of the site. The Stearns Quarry site presents a unique opportunity to engage temporal change, transformation, adaptation and succession at the scale of the building, the city and the landscape. By engaging the materials on the site in a process of excavation, recycling, and recovery, the studio addresses a prolonged understanding of architecture, one that acknowledges duration within the framework of architectural design. Engaged in the unpredictable interface of nature, history, construction and imagination, we will attempt to arrest, reverse, stretch, divert, adhere and accelerate the temporal qualities of architecture. The studio hopes to arrive at a strategy of reworking the landscape, rather than a finite architectural object- a shift from product to process. In doing so, it seeks to unleash urban scaled material effects within the deep surface of the landscape.
"The course is designed to provide a better understanding of the built environment, globalization, the current financial crisis and the impact of these factors on the rapidly changing and evolving international architecture, engineering, construction fields. We will, hopefully, obtain a better understanding of how these forces of globalization and the current financial crisis are having an impact on the built environment and how they will affect firms and your future career opportunities. We will also identify, review and discuss best practices and lessons that can be learned from recent events. We will explore the "international built environment" in detail, examining how it functions and asking what are the managerial, entrepreneurial and professional opportunities, challenges and risks in it, especially growing crossover and multi-disciplinary opportunities; and we will seek to understand what makes this "built environment" so different from other sectors."
Students are presented with an engineering challenge: To design a sustainable guest village within the Saguaro National Park in Arizona. Through four lessons and six associated activities, they study ecological relationships with an emphasis on the Sonoran Desert. They examine species adaptations. They come to appreciate the complexity and balance that supports the exchange of energy and matter within food webs. Then students apply what they have learned about these natural relationships to the study of biomimicry and sustainable design. They study the flight patterns of birds and relate their functional design to aeronautical engineering. A computer simulation model is also incorporated into this unit and students use this program to examine perturbations within a simple ecosystem. The solution rests within the lessons and applications of this unit.
This wiki page describes the goals and tenents of improv, as well as four different improv activities (Name Gesture Circle, Yellow Ball, Vacations, and Thank You) used in ISKME's Professional Development Teacher Academy: Teachers as Makers June 15-16 2010 at San Mateo County Office of Education.
Teacher David Pretos classroom is visited by teacher evaluator Renee OLeary. She suggests he work on engaging students by making lessons more active and communicating class goals more specifically. Watch him take her advice and put it into action.
This site challenges visitors to test their knowledge about inaugurations and presidential history with a 10 question quiz.
In this lesson students build their knowledge base and learn to read and summarize informational texts. Students will be able to read and summarize informational text, identify key details from surprising details, and recognize the main ideas/concepts presented in articles. They will also be able to listen, take notes, and discuss the issues presented in informational texts with a small group.
In this Wide Angle video segment, a young Indian girl talks about her life, family, education and daily routine.
Subject applies cognitive science and technology to the industrial design process. Introduces prototyping techniques and approaches for objective evaluation as part of the design process. Students practice evaluating products with mechanical and electronic aspects. Evaluation process is applied to creating functioning smart product prototypes. Project oriented subject that draws upon engineering, aesthetic, and creative skills. Subject is geared towards students interested in creating physical products which encompass electronics and computers in order to include them in smart scenarios. Students present readings, learn prototyping skills, create a product prototype, and complete a publication style paper.
The lesson provides an opportunity for students to not only read and view the importance of choosing career choices now, but gives them an opportunity to write about their future career goals and think about the best way to achieve them starting now.
This seminar examines efforts in developing and advanced nations and regions to create, finance, and regulate infrastructure and energy technologies from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives. It is conducted with intensive in-class discussions and debates.
A young, injured otter must find his way during the winter in Yellowstone National Park in this segment from Nature.
In this From the Top at Carnegie Hall video segment, hear a young double bassist from Hawaii play a soulful contemporary piece.
Building a culture of respect while still challenging students to share their voices requires thoughtful and careful facilitation by the teacher. Urban Academy teachers discuss the roles they play across subject areas to develop this respect in their school and how consistency across disciplines helps to establish respect among students. Three guiding principles come out of the teachers' reflection that foster a culture of respect. Teachers do not allow personal attacks, asking students to instead 'attack' ideas instead of people. In facilitating discussions, teachers avoid questions with 'right/wrong' answers, recognizing the value of all students' responses, and arbitrate fairly so that students trust teachers to manage sometimes controversial subjects fairly.
In an effort to promote deeper analysis and understanding of multiple viewpoints, Urban Academy teachers discuss the conscious decisions they make to promote this type of discussion. The group reflects on how they structure discussions to highlight different perspectives and also rephrase and restate student comments to heighten differences in opinions and to draw out additional responses. In reacting and responding to these differences, students participate in a deeper analysis.
Using an inquiry based approach has a profound effect on the depth and complexity of classroom discussions. In this video, students share how this is different than what they've previously experienced and we see teacher, Avram Barlowe, use primary source documents to drive discussions about freedom as it existed during Reconstruction following the Civil War. Recognizing that these documents describe both daily life and larger political and social ideas, Avram expects that the discussion will focus on both elements but will be largely driven by student comments and reactions to each text. In preparation for this inquiry based approach, Avram shares how he develops many questions that may never be used and must be ready to use students' comments and questions to facilitate the resulting discussion. Even though he knows ahead of time that there are specific issues that should be explored, he does not come into the discussion with specific answers or outcome for these issues. Avram sees the text as a vehicle in which the students can explore ideas that interest them and requires that students use multiple documents to challenge their thinking and extend their understanding of differing perspectives. In this way, students are prepared to not only discuss these ideas in this informal setting but are also prepared to read analytically and write about these ideas, considering multiple perspectives.
Supporting participation from all students is a challenging part of every teacher's practice. Discussing the different ways in which they support and encourage quieter students, Urban Academy teachers share ideas and reflect on the different ways in which students participate in learning. They recognize that different students participate in different ways and at different times but also make conscious decisions to support those who are not actively sharing ideas with the class. We see this happen with one student, Ebony, who was reluctant to share ideas but gains confidence through one-on-one coaching with her teacher, Sheila Kosoff. To support building this confidence, teachers discuss planning discussions outside of class and organizing smaller group discussions before bringing the whole class together.
Four teachers at Urban Academy Laboratory High School talk about how they use the inquiry approach in their teaching. History teacher Adam Grumbach talks about how using the inquiry model is a helpful strategy for teaching students of mixed abilities while History teacher Avram Barlowe discusses how the inquiry model is enriched by diverse participants. As students are shown having an inquiry-based discussion, we see evidence of different points of view and the importance of having these discussions in the context of the classroom. Adam shares the significance of having discussions with students from diverse backgrounds and diverse viewpoints and points out that this has as much educational value as more traditional learning opportunities. At the close of the video, four components of the inquiry approach are identified: it promotes a diversity of voices, it creates opportunities for students to share opinions, it teaches students how to use evidence and builds students' confidence.
This subject explores the varied nature and practice of computation in design. We will view computation and design broadly. Computation will include both work done on the computer (digital computing) and by-hand. Design will include both the process of making designs and artifacts, as well as the designs and artifacts themselves. The aim of the course is to develop a view of computation and design beyond the specifics of techniques and tools, and a critical, self-awareness of our own approaches and metaphors for computation and design.