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Preface
- University of New Mexico Press
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| xv Preface The Knowing Eye For the past forty years my mind has been on the topic of learning environments and how schools, classrooms, playgrounds, homes, museums, and parks affect children and their learning. As I look back, I see that each year of experience is layered one upon the next, much as an architect uses tracing paper during early planning to explore iterations and suggest solutions to design problems. Similar to architects, those of us trying to build new ideas move from the first quick sketch of thought to increasingly careful renderings, finally fleshing out our ideas and giving them dimension through design of models and construction of the final product. The meaning of our work is in the process as well as in the end result. As a professor working in the University of New Mexico’s School of Architecture and Planning, I have had the unique opportunity to act as a pioneer , merging the two disciplines of education and architecture in my daily thinking and experiences in the field. Architecture first impressed me as an applied learning and teaching tool through its studio design method and its interdisciplinary nature. Next, as I took students out into the world to develop their sense of perception and wonder, I saw how architecture and the physical environment were in themselves teaching tools. This, in turn, suggested a new path for the architect, who can become an educator of aesthetics, and for the teacher, who becomes a designer of the mind. This is the personal cycle of pragmatic learning that informs my book. My colleagues and I have worked hard to link the disciplines of architecture and education through the investigation and development of architectural programming processes and the remediation of school design based on best educational practices. Our key contribution has been to help planners and their clients translate educational theory, academic goals, and developmental rights of children into architectural design criteria for schools. As a result of thoughtful and qualitative planning, educational concepts are built into the learning Preface xvi | Above: The work of Santiago Calatrava fuses art, architecture, and engineering, linking the technical demands of structure with the freedom of transforming creation. These studies of the eye and eyelid are courtesy of the Santiago Calatrava Archive. © Santiago Calatrava. Right: Cuidad de las Artes y de las Ciencias (City of Arts and Sciences), Valencia, Spain. The design result of Calatrava’s thought processes is manifested in the form of the planetarium with its elliptical, eye-shaped plan and hemispheric dome with movable ribbed covering. Similarly, our educational goals must be embedded in our learning environment designs. Santiago Calatrava, architect and engineer. Photograph © Barbara Burg and Oliver Schuh, Palladium Photodesign, http://www.palladium.de/. [3.239.15.46] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:02 GMT) | xvii environment. The environment itself and the objects within it become a teaching tool or “three-dimensional textbook.” Architects must integrate many aspects of design to create a whole and wholesome learning environment by not addressing merely a numerical program , however important the size and cost, but also a deeper program responding to the needs of the user, the community, and the Earth. Educators, in turn, must identify the current needs of the active, whole learner while expanding their own understanding of built, natural, and cultural environments as teaching and learning tools. Once we learn to “read” the environment, we become more aware. We open our eyes and minds to the wisdom and order in the universe , thus cultivating what I have come to call the “knowing eye.” Architect Robert Peters describes the knowing eye as a type of visual literacy that enables architects and artists to see and critically analyze the physical world. The special training architects receive sharpens perception, increases discernment, and helps individuals form an aesthetic sense of the environment . The knowing eye is not solely a sensory mechanism, but rather an organ of wisdom, a mind’s eye that allows us to read the environment with deep understanding. I believe we are all inherently wired to seek meaning and that the knowing eye does not have to remain the province of a select few. Developing the knowing eye means temporarily suspending the past, opening ourselves to new possibilities, and choosing creativity over destructive or negative impulses. As we move beyond traditional images of schools so familiar to us that they have become essentially invisible to our critical judgment, we ultimately reach a thoughtful and deeply felt understanding of the harmonies...