Agenda: Create an educational atmosphere
that embraces fragments of changing knowledge,
cross connections, and a defamiliarization of hierarchy.
Push the limits of education as a lifestyle
not merely what you do in school through
connections with the public.
The 21st century student wakes up and walks to school while processing the night before that included immersion in culture. He enters the urban school and finds himself looking at present day tools, clothes, and ideas (those that are in his hands and from the night before), but is looking at them in the manner of a museum. He is immediately removed from them and challenged to move forward. The architecture is being pushed programmatically to bring about new ideas and spaces. The museum is composed of fragments of knowledge that are continually subtracted and added to. The museum connects the classrooms, auditorium, cafeteria, student center, studios, labs, health care facility, and gymnasium. The bathrooms are located centrally as areas of exchange with the reintroduction of the bathroom parlor, which is an event on visible display. There are no separate offices and teacher cafeteria because the teachers work in the classrooms, studios, and labs and eat with the students in the cafeteria. The auditorium, gymnasium, and cafeteria are open to the public and allows for information exchange outside of the classroom. The teachers, students, and public are part of the same culture and should be seen by each other. Students and teachers have a better understanding of each other’s roles because they are visible. In the evening the school hosts “expression parties”, sponsored by city work places, in which present day plays, exhibitions, competitions, and games express what is being learned at the school and more importantly allow for a critique of that expression.
