{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.021467688937568456, 'fraction_numerical': 0.00547645125958379, 'mean_word_length': 4.736180904522613, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Architecture as Pedagogy II

As commonly practiced, education has little to do with its specific setting or locality. The typical campus is regarded mostly as a place where learning occurs but is, itself, not believed to be the source of useful learning. It is intended, rather, to be convenient, efficient, or aesthetically pleasing, but not instructional. It neither requires nor facilitates competence or mindfulness. By that standard, the same education could happen as well in California or in Kazakhstan, or on Mars, for that matter. The same could be said of the buildings and landscape that make up a college campus (Orr 1993). The design of buildings and landscape is thought to have little or nothing to do with the process of learning or the quality of scholarship that occurs in a particular place. In fact, buildings and landscape reflect a hidden curriculum that powerfully influences the learning process. The curriculum embedded in any building instructs as fully and as powerfully as any course taught in it. Most of my classes, for example, are taught in a building that I think Descartes would have liked. It is a building with lots of squareness and straight lines. There is nothing whatsoever that reflects its locality in northeast Ohio in what had once been a vast forested wetland (Sherman 1996). How it is cooled, heated, and lighted and at what cost to the world is an utter mystery to its occupants. It offers no clue about the origins of the materials used to build it. It tells no story. With only minor modifications it could be converted to use as a factory or prison. When classes are over, students seldom linger for long. The building resonates with no part of our biology, evolutionary experience, or aesthetic sensibilities. It reflects no understanding of ecology or ecological processes. It is intended to be functional, efficient, minimally offensive, and little more. But what else does it do? First, it tells its users that locality, knowing where you are, is unimportant. To be sure, this is not said in so many words anywhere in this or any other building. Rather, it is said tacitly throughout the entire building. Second, because it uses energy wastefully, the building tells its users that energy is cheap and abundant and can be squandered with no thought for the morrow. Third, nowhere in the building do students learn about the materials used in its construction or who was downwind or downstream from the wells, mines, forests, and manufacturing facilities where those materials originated or where they eventually will be discarded. And the lesson learned is mindlessness; it teaches that disconnectedness is normal. And try as one might to teach that we are implicated in the larger enterprise of life, standard architectural design mostly conveys other lessons. There is often a miscalibration between the lesson of interconnectedness when it is taught in classes and the way buildings actually work. Buildings are provisioned with energy, materials, and water, and dispose of their waste in ways that say to students that the world is linear and that we are not part of the larger web of life. Finally, there is no apparent connection in this or any other building on campus to the larger set of issues having to do with climatic change, biotic impoverishment, and the unraveling of the fabric of life on Earth. Students begin to suspect, I think, that those issues are unreal, or that they are unsolvable in any practical way, or that they occur somewhere else. Is it possible to design buildings and entire campuses in ways that promote ecological competence and mindfulness (Lyle 1994)? Through better design is it possible to teach our students that our problems are solvable and that we are connected to the larger community of life? As an experiment, I organized a class of students in 1992–1993 to develop what architects call a pre-program for an environmental studies center at Oberlin College. Twenty-five students and a dozen architects met over two semesters to develop the core ideas for the project. The first order of business was to question why we ought to do anything at all. Once the need for facilities was established, the participants questioned whether we ought to build new facilities or renovate an existing building. Students and faculty examined a dozen or so possibilities to renovate and for a variety of reasons decided that the best approach was new construction. The basic program that emerged from the year-long class called for an approximately 14,000square-foot building that