Anne Taylor currently acquired the National AIA Collaborative and Professional Achievement Award for both her long time-lengthy paintings linking structure and education and her contributions to the architectural career. (The other recipients include urbanist John Gehl and Michael Sorkin, planner and critic.) According to the AIA, the collaborative fulfillment award acknowledges “the excellence that consequences when architects paintings with the ones from outdoor the profession to improve the spaces wherein humans stay and work.”
A lifelong educator, Taylor is president of the School Zone Institute, which sponsors the Architecture and Children Design Education Program. She is professor emerita on the University of New Mexico’s School of Architecture and Planning, in addition to a prominent Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture professor. Recently I talked to her approximately the award, the strength of layout thinking, and the splendor of stewardship.
Katherine Enggass: It appears to me that “collaborative” is the important thing phrase that describes your method.
Anne Taylor: It’s real. I’m thankful to all of the human beings who have contributed to my efforts to empower children thru a new manner of wondering in our faculties: design thinking. I desire that I even have stimulated others via the design of rich mastering environments, architectural programming for faculties, instructor and architect training workshops, and interdisciplinary curriculum development. None of those projects would have seen fruition without the hard paintings of implementation by using the designers with whom I’ve collaborated. It appeared like they wished a cheerleader.
KE: Perhaps the award offers you every other platform for dissemination of your thoughts. If so, what are the most essential messages you need to impart to architects today?
A: I suppose it took a person from out of doors the area to look the cost of the problem-solving technique by means of which architects are educated. With the assistance of the AIA and others, we’ve helped invent a new role for architects. It’s an explosion. It’s as though design training has been a carefully guarded mystery a lot of these years, and now we’re seeking to blast it open, to unlock it as a brand new pedagogy. Interdisciplinary design schooling of architects can be as it should be tailored to serve newbies PK–12 and beyond.
Despite the latest backlash to it within the as a substitute insular layout world, I’m convinced that design questioning gives us an incredible method for the decision of demanding situations. The system has steps very much like the scientific method: having a felt issue or problem to solve; creating a hypothesis; amassing and studying applicable statistics; trying out a chain of trial solutions; making crucial aesthetic judgments; and then refining the paintings as needed. This is an included, dynamic, and responsive manner of questioning, an effective manner to tackle troubles. As Andrew Pressman says in his ebook Design Thinking: A Guide to Creative Problem Solving for Everyone, the capabilities found out through architects can extend to other realms, from politics to commercial enterprise to education. We can all advantage.
A: We’re taking the architectural layout studio model and making use of it to the lecture room. Not only in terms of system, however, we also are trying to transform the static bodily getting to know environment right into a layout middle that helps palms-on, lively, creative studying. By this I mean massive horizontal paintings surfaces; undertaking to light; areas for model constructing and garage for works in progress; stackable, flexible, deployable fixtures (on wheels); writable presentation walls and light tables everywhere. Another concept for provisioning is a system of manipulatives and tools in the environment which have been inventoried for their developmental blessings to kids. Overall, we’re moving from an instructor-focused to a scholar-centered environment.
KE: One crucial consciousness has been in your Architecture and Children Program (A&C). What’s the program, and the way has it empowered youngsters to do their very own learning?
AT: The A&C software teaches students to use the built, herbal, and cultural environment as a tool to observe the arena and the thoughts, legal guidelines, and principles that govern it. While teaching about architecture, the program is largely invested within the manner of learning thru visible questioning, trouble-solving, creative notion, teamwork, presentation and communication abilties.
The goal of this system is to promote using interdisciplinary mastering via architecture and layout. The A&C Teachers Guide supports a poster curriculum of 14 interdisciplinary design projects tied to center curriculum requirements, consists of an arms-on getting to know a technique, and is predicated on student presentations and portfolio evaluation to assess layout method and product. We’ve tailored the program to the needs of unique schools, and it’s been translated into Spanish, Japanese, and Turkish, and shortly Chinese and Korean.
