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Outside the Academy
If your professors won't teach sustainablilty, find someone who will.
By Kristi Cameron
August/September 2002
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This children's museum model (above)--designed by Ecosa students Viki
Anderson, Casey Crawmer, Eric Davenport, Dan Langlie, Kelly Mahoney, and
Aaron Tweedie for the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University--demonstrates
alternative energy principles and was based on a solar-access study of
the site (below).
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Paolo Soleri's Cosanti Foundation headquarters is among the sites
students visit during the semester.
Photos: Courtesy Ecosa Institute
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You are a design student. It's your first day on campus. You are given
a bag of granola and dropped off in the wilderness. This is how students
at the Ecosa Institute--the only design program in the country devoted entirely
to sustainability--spend the initial three days of their semester.
A nonprofit organization located in Prescott, Arizona, Ecosa began
offering its immersion program in fall 2000. The wilderness trek is meant
to establish the baseline for sustainability. It also distinguishes the
school's way of teaching the subject from the growing number of courses
scattered throughout mainstream schools today. "Sustainability is really
the critical issue of our time," director Antony Brown says. "And
while I think the profession is moving very quickly toward beginning to
incorporate that in their actions, there's a real need for a whole systems
approach that doesn't just look at energy efficiency, land use, or
isolated issues."
The one-semester program at Ecosa offers more comprehensive green-building
knowledge than a traditional four-year architecture program. Design students
hungry for a holistic program add Ecosa to their education--even though
it isn't accredited--because they simply can't learn this stuff anywhere
else. "I didn't feel that I could study sustainability at the University
of Oregon without a lot of extra effort and time on my part," architecture
student Alissa McNair says. "The curriculum at Ecosa provided me with
the broadest introduction to sustainability possible in sixteen weeks."
In Ecosa's classroom, work progresses quickly. Fifteen or so students of
architecture, design, and planning--a mix of undergraduates, grad students,
and some practicing professionals--start by designing residences for real
clients from the community. Throughout the process experts are brought in
to discuss issues such as solar design and materials. The group also takes
field trips: they've studied regional building wisdom at Hopi and Navajo
reservations, gone to green architect Will Bruder's studio, and visited
Tucson to analyze New Urbanism, co-housing, and permaculture landscaping.
By the end of the semester they work in teams on larger, more complex public
projects; last term included a children's museum for the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical
University and a multidisciplinary facility for Prescott College.
"To teach sustainability requires a completely different approach to
design education. You can't teach whole systems thinking and integrated
systems like you teach technical drawing skills," operations director
Rob Israel says. "Other programs are still teaching a course for maybe
an hour and a half, and then the students go on to their next class and
do something completely different. It's kind of an add-on rather than the
core curriculum."
That's why Ecosa was founded independently of any college. "Honestly
we feel that trying to constantly bend to the mainstream university system
is a terrible tragedy given that it is these mainstream educational systems
that have put us in the position we are in as a society," Israel says.
"At Ecosa we're trying to do things differently."
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