Sunday, December 18, 2011. Installation day at the Donald E. Long Juvenile Detention Center. After a grueling series of rigorous design sessions, seemingly endless debates over major priorities and tiny details, and days of triumphs, disappointments, dust, sore muscles, festering frustrations, egos, ideas, and an uncountable number of small, stunning moments of resolution and grace, here we all were, together, staring over a jumbled pile of bookcases, drop cloths, and to-do lists at a looming 4:00 pm deadline.

Configuring (above) and assembling (middle and below) the modified, relocated bookcases

Read more…

My mother teaches at a similar facility to the Donald E. Long Juvenile Detention Center. Her stories made me apprehensive about this design-build initiative. But after listening to PNCA professor Barry Sanders passionately describe his experience teaching incarcerated kids and his rationale for investing in their education, I found myself committed to grasping what this project reached for.

Visiting artist Jack Sanders discusses the development of the diorama concept with students

Visiting artists Jack Sanders and Butch Anthony strategize for the build phase

Read more…

What is sustainable?  More to the point, what does the word mean when applied to a school? The MUSE school, founded by Suzy Cameron, offers some insight. The new campus in the Malibu hills opened with the help from Ecovations, a design firm that has re-envisioned the possibilities, indeed the very definition of sustainability. This is not an “expensive” or “faddish” place. At the Muse school, sustainable means healthy, integrative, and economically self-sufficient. The mission, according to Cameron, is to combine culture with sustainability and language and its name, Muse, which was her husband’s idea, epitomizes the philosophy of the school: inspiration.

Treehouse.  Photo: Sherin Wing

While its primary goal is to educate children from Pre-K to 8, its edifying influence extends to everyone involved with the school: staff, teachers, parents, and even the community. All are involved in the school’s ongoing evolution. Indeed, many of the adults find that here they learn about the small and large interventions they can make in order to achieve a more healthy approach to living precisely because many of the MUSE strategies are inexpensive (composting and growing food), and can be practiced at home (drinking filtered water in glasses rather than buying bottles).

Read more…

The phrase “bridging the gap” has been a hallmark of debates about architectural education and practice for as long as anyone can remember, with architecture’s unique “internship” period widely regarded and relied on as that bridge. It’s the catch-all and catch-up period between education and practice, which most educators and practitioners readily acknowledge needs bridging. For the estimated one-third of graduates that become registered architects, effectively all internships take place in a traditional design firm setting, under the tutelage of a registered architect.

In their vitally important new anthology, Bridging the Gap: Public-Interest Architectural Internships, co-editors editors Georgia Bizios and Katie Wakeford of North Carolina State University, shine a bright light on an exceedingly rare, but promising breed of architectural internships, focused on the public interest. These internships take place beyond the walls of firms, and are instead embedded in nonprofits and community organizations across the country. With 19 co-contributors, Bizios and Wakeford masterfully unite a veritable who’s who of public-interest design advocates—Victoria Beach, Bryan Bell, Thomas Fisher, David Perkes, and Michael Pyatok, among others—with some fresh new voices—Andrew Caruso, Sam Valentine, Katherine Williams, and Esther Yang, to name a few. Collectively, they hail from big firms (like Gensler), community design centers, nonprofits, and universities. Most essayists weave personal narratives with anecdotes about their internship experiences; the stories illustrate the array of settings that architecture graduates can and are working in, but also the struggles they face in the process.

Read more…

In news that will surely gladden the hearts (and backs!) of schoolchildren everywhere, the Yale School of Medicine announced today that it will give each of its students an iPad2 for classroom and clinical use. All paper-based course materials will be eliminated. “We started thinking about this about a year and half ago, shortly after the iPad was released,” says Michael Schwartz, assistant dean for curriculum at the school. “We were spending a hundred thousand dollars a year on paper, and the students didn’t always read it.” (Medical students, it turns out, aren’t all that different from twelve-year-olds.)

The advantages here seem obvious: cost, environmental footprint, and ease of use. At any time, students can hit the “sync button,” as Schwartz calls it, and get revised lectures. This paperless transition was done without a lot of IT expertise, in house, with relative ease.  “We set up a server, which compressed and condensed the data for use on the iPad,” Schwartz says.

So is the beginning of the end for the traditional textbook? “I think so,” he says. “It’s much more convenient, easy to update. In the old days, we had to wait for an updated edition of the book. Now if a teacher wants to change their approach, they can easily do that and it’s fresh for the next year.”

It seems as if it’s just a matter of time—and budget—before all schools eliminate the physical textbook, and end that all too common sight: the 70-pound student lugging forty pounds of textbooks in a bulging backpack, bent slightly at the waist from the effort, as if trudging into a stiff wind. Good riddance.

I’m trying to remember, did I ever think about things like public design, civic planning, or product innovation in the eighth grade?  I’ll be honest, the eighth grade wasn’t all that long ago. I know that in language arts we mapped sentences; we learned about Julius Caesar’s murderous frenemies in Latin class. But the real-world work of designers—isolating problems, then drafting, tweaking and prototyping solutions—I don’t remember that being part of our curriculum. Lately, however, design practice, with its inherent capacity for invention, community engagement and change, is finding new relevance in K-12 classrooms.

Young designers are encouraged by institutions to participate in solving social and environmental problems. The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and Ford Motor Co. Fund, for instance announced, just last week, the winners of their Community Design Competition.  The competition challenged students to locate opportunities for improvement within their communities, and then brainstorm solutions.  Open to schools in Miami, Chicago, San Antonio and San Diego, the competition is part of the Smithsonian and Cooper-Hewitt’s ongoing promotion of design as valuable, educative practice for young people.  The entries attest to the creativity, enthusiasm, and thoughtfulness with which the students approached their communities’ needs.

First-place glory and $5,000 was awarded to the Henry Ford Academy: Alameda School of Art + Design in San Antonio. The 9^th-grade students designed a backpack specifically tailored to the needs of the homeless, inspired by their neighbors at the Haven 4 Hope Transition Shelter only a block from their school.

Read more…

After my conversation with Denise Guerin, president of the Interior Design Education Council (IDEC), I took a closer look at the IDEA-Line, to learn how the program helps practitioners navigate to graduate programs.

A training session at the 2011 IDEC conference.

A trend is clearly in the making. Practitioners are starting to teach interior design or elect to go back to school to hone their skills. But many have a hard time figuring out which graduate program best fits their needs. And no one knows what to expect when reentering academia. Enter the IDEA-Line, a resource for practitioners looking for graduate programs in North America. It also encourages practitioners to talk to advisers and students about the challenges of going back to school, and identify the rewards and pitfalls of teaching in a design school. Read more…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the average American is finding his or her relationship to health and wellness a bit… well… on the rocks. In a time of decreased fitness, increased processed foods, and a general lack of self awareness, most of us can’t figure out how to repair this broken relationship, though we really want to. A classic case of “it’s not you, it’s me.” Who’d have thought that the semester of health classes in high school wouldn’t give us the answers we’d need 5, 10, 20 or even 50 years later?

Enter Kaiser Permanente’s interactive Center for Total Health—the therapist you’ve been looking for, that is, if you’re in the Washington D.C. area. The new center was created to begin the discussion on national health as well as act as a meet-and-greet between patients and new medical innovations.

That tablet your doctor is carrying instead of her standard clipboard? It’s probably the new Blackberry Playbook which is being used to look up your medical chart or scan the barcode of the prescription you’ll be picking up in an hour. Having trouble remembering when to take how much of that particular medicine? The Philips Medication Dispensing Service will dispense, in your home, the correct medication at the right dosage at the right time. Or even if you’re in perfect health, you may be intrigued by GE Health’s Vscan ultrasound, which looks like a sleek device from the iPod family, but is capable of allowing sonographers to take their services to rural areas where such technologies aren’t yet available. In the realistic future, we may not be androids, but we sure are using them to our advantage. Read more…

Denise Guerin at the IDEC’s annual conference, photo: Sarah R. Donahue.

I recently sat down with Denise Guerin, 2010-2011 president of the Interior Design Education Council (IDEC), after the organization’s annual meeting. She shared her concerns and optimism for the education of young designers, the need for more qualified instructors, and how practitioners can make the transition into teaching. While many interior design programs require educators to hold at least a master’s degree in order to teach, IDEC is suggesting that practitioners with years of practical experience should have the opportunity to share their knowledge with college students. Much of our conversation stemmed from IDEC’s white paper, Path from Practitioner to Professor, which makes formal recommendations to directors of interior design programs.

Georgy Olivieri: Why did IDEC find it important to make formal recommendations regarding the teaching of interior design?

Denise Guerin: There is a shortage of qualified interior design instructors, and in order to address and solve this problem we must first ask ourselves how we got to this point. From our perspective, there are three reasons that explain how this shortage came about:

• First, the interior design profession has grown in popularity; therefore, we are seeing more applicants for interior design programs in schools and universities.
• Second, the business world is recognizing the importance of syncing design with company goals and objectives.
• Third, as many Baby Boomers begin to retire, the number of qualified professionals, those with a master’s degree, is shrinking, yet the number of programs is growing. Additionally, many institutions are shifting interior design from two-year to four-year programs, which have increased the need for teachers in both public and private institutions.

GO: How can this void be filled? Read more…

An upbeat article in a 2008 architectural magazine featured chirpy stories of enterprising young architects who, unable to find positions in their chosen profession turned to alternative professions.  Now, twenty months on, it’s doubtful they’ll ever come back. Many economists predict a slow, plodding recovery beginning in the third quarter of 2011. Others are less sanguine. In either case, the durability of the present recession will elongate the period in which young graduate architects leave the profession and inevitably reduce the number of young people choosing an architectural education in the first place. One has to ask, how will this influence the practice of architecture?

The breathtaking rapidity of the 2008 economic deceleration and the collapse of credit distinguish it from its predecessors in a ways that have made an even greater impact on architects than previous recessions. The job board Simplyhired.com tracked the loss of architecture jobs when the recession hit, logging a sharp decrease of 11% from March 2007 to September 2008. Architecture firms had staffs totaling about 221,000 people that summer, which by the summer of 2010 had dropped to 167,000.  Naturally, such statistic hits recent graduates hardest.  

In the current downturn, national unemployment hovers just below 10%, yet in April 2009 the Boston Society of Architects estimated an unemployment rate among local architects of between 30% and 50%. To put it in stark terms, the unemployment rate among architects in Boston is as much as twice the national level during the Great Depression and likely to get worse. The same is true in other cities. One obvious reason for the wildly disproportionate impact upon architects this time is the dependence of building on financing, the machinery of which has seized.

Just as the long recession of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s decimated an age cohort in the practice of architecture, we should anticipate an absence of working architects in graduating classes of 2008 through 2010 and probably beyond.  This one will be even longer.  The reduction in the number of new architects entering – and working architects leaving – the field will be exacerbated by the increased difficulty and expense of becoming licensed to practice architecture and the burdens of maintaining licensure that did not exist in the 1970s and were only beginning in the 1990s. Read more…