Edutopia - April/May 2008 - (Page 28)

THINKING FORWARD Three exemplary schools reveal the shape of things to come. By Owen Edwards s technology moves from the periphery of the classroom to the center, one of the vital challenges facing architects who design schools is to create learning environments that recognize the key role of tech without losing touch with the human needs of students. The complexity of this challenge increases with grade levels, but the need for enabling surroundings begins from the ⇒rst day a child enters preschool or kindergarten. In the end, however profoundly the digital information age has changed the extent to which students can project themselves out into a vast new universe of learning, they are real people, not avatars, studying in real buildings with real physical and psychological needs. Since 2000, DesignShare, an architecturally based facilitator of ideas and resources on innovation in schools, has asked a panel of experts for the best in school design. After an extensive search, the organization awards prizes for school construction and renovation that represent the best thinking in a ⇒eld as crucial to the future as any in all of architecture. The common theme of the three schools presented here— A each a DesignShare honor or merit winner for 2007—according to Tiffany Green, the organization’s communications director, is that “they meet the needs of students now and into the future, taking into account the environmental psychology of learning for a generation of learners who are wildly visual and technologically savvy on one extreme and on the other may be bored and underachieving.” On this and the following pages, Edutopia presents three of the schools DesignShare recognized for design excellence: The innovative Yuyu-no-mori nursery school, in Yokohama City, Japan, with its playful, child-centered emphasis; the Denver School of Science and Technology, with its exceptional information age aura of the expansiveness of digital power; and Polaris, a K–12 school in Anchorage, Alaska, which combines architectural openness with reassuring intimacy. These schools are prime examples of the best in twenty-⇒rst-century design. Each, in its own way, stands for the ideal of architecture that focuses on the DesignShare virtues of “transparency, personal development, lifelong learning, and the in⇓uence of the built environment as a motivator.” 28 EDUTOPIA APRIL/MAY 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Edutopia - April 2008

Edutopia - April 2008 Contents Up Front Feedback Dispatches Sage Advice Ask Ellen Head of the Class Cool Schools Design Reinventing the Big test The Daring Dozen Heart & Soul Pop Quiz: Jack Prelutsky

Edutopia - April 2008

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