How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses

This is a pretty interesting article about some radical new teaching methods that are being investigated in places like India and Mexico. It is not architecturally specific, but I think it could prove relevant for a lot of people in the class working with ideas of the digital in architecture. Hope it's useful !

Transforming Orphan Spaces

Mobile phone has been described by Kenichi Fujimoto as personal ‘territory machine,’ capable of transforming any space – a subway train seat, a grocery store aisle, a street corner – into one’s own room and personal paradise. 

Sentient City – Mark Shepard 

Mobile technologies have removed the human level of interaction within public spaces, changing the way individuals interact in a space, which results to orphaned spaces.

At one level, one can stay connected to a virtual network, communicate and listen to music; at another level, to provide a certain amount of privacy.

People plug out from the physical space the moment earbuds from a mobile device is used. Mobile technology becomes a tool to organize space, time and boundaries around the individual in public spaces.

Digital Botanic Architecture

As I was researching information on adaptive environments embedded in architecture, I came across this book by Dennis Dollens. Although it is not directly related to what I am interested in, Dollens presents an interesting synthesis between architecture and biology, specifically botanic architecture. He argues that with architecture being reduced to the concept of a machine (or object), it has been divorced from the notion of being a living organism that is capable of growing and adapting.

"If man's phenomenal success in colonizing all parts of the globe is specifically owing to technology - sanitary/health, heating/cooling, and transportation systems, etc. - then it makes at least partial sense to look to technology for evolving and correcting the seemingly uncorrectable mess that success has caused it. In a sense, to regrow or overgrow development."

He conducts biomimetic research to investigate how vegetation (morphological properties) can be integrated with architectural systems like structural framing.

"Importantly, biomimetic investigation can be used to produce architectural and design prototypes where morphological qualities of a plant, say leaf overlap, or asymmetric harmonic proportion (Fibonacci phyllotaxis) can be applied to the shape and function of potential architectural structures and surfaces while maintaing a linked consideration of the new material properties intended to bring the structure into being as a bioanimate environmental participant and sensor."

For Dollens, his concern is that architecture in its regard as a machine has lost its biological connections and thereby no longer able to respond to environmental conditions. Through understanding Louis Sullivan's A System of Architectural Ornament, Dollens literally applies the theory of "form follows function" through the investigation of botany and its behaviour. He uses digital technology (Xfrog with algorithmic based controls) as a strategy to synthesize architecture with biology.