Buildings That Teach
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By Noah Buhayar
What can the built environment teach us about ourselves, about the environment in which we live? What cultural values can buildings impart?
These were the questions posed by RMI's Built Environment Team principal Victor Olgyay and fellow Erik Bonnett at the Green Schools Summit, an event hosted at the Denver Art Museum by the Donnell-Kay Foundation to bring together green building professionals with educators and school leaders.
When designing a high-performance school building, “we’re not just thinking about green buildings, we want to start thinking about how children learn,” said Olgyay.
Architecture, he noted, has the opportunity to crystallize pedagogy. “What happens in our buildings helps form how we are” and how we interact with the world, he said.
Green schools, he added, should take advantage of this opportunity and think about how building design can impart lessons about sustainability, environmental restoration and justice.
Bonnet and Olgyay highlighted how several schools and learning centers have already begun to capitalize on the pedagogical aspects of buildings.
The design of Fossil Ridge High School in Fort Collins, they said, clearly demonstrates to students, faculty, and visitors features that reduce energy use, save water and improve indoor environmental quality. From photovoltaic panels near the entrance to prominent shading devices, the school is capitalizing on people’s curiosity.
“You look at the building facade and it makes you ask, ‘Why did they do that?',” said Olgyay.
Other facilities, such as the IslandWood School on Bainbridge Island, Washington are incorporating the benefits of high-performance spaces directly into the curriculum.
“The project is particularly poignant when you get to the learning,” said Bonnett.
An on-site greenhouse gives students the opportunity to learn plant biology close-up. A tree house classroom provides an ideal location for a lesson on birds.
“Of course green buildings are going to save energy; they can save water; they might even create biologically more diverse environments,” Olgyay said.
But the larger, longer-term benefit is that they “get students engaged in a system, internalizing things that to date have been perceived as externalities.”
For Olgyay and Bonnett, this is the real promise of green schools, and to an extent, all high-performance buildings.
“Green buildings have the opportunities to create those connections between individual actions and environmental concerns,” Olgyay said, and ultimately instigate broad cultural change.