Environment as the Third Teacher

A school is more than just its students, teachers, and textbooks; it also includes a building, which is essential to a child’s education and personal growth. Loris Malaguzzi, founder of the Reggio-Emilia educational philosophy in the early twentieth century, called the environment the “third teacher,” together with a student’s parents and teachers. In its full manifestation, the multidimensional school environment inspires and nurtures children by activating all of their senses—a position that Core Architecture Studio II explored this semester.

All eight Core II studios focused on the design of a K-8 public school on the site of P.S. 64, located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Designed by C.B.J. Snyder in 1906, P.S. 64 served as a New York City public school for seventy years before it was shuttered. Today, the building remains abandoned. As part of the research for their design projects, Core II students visited the vacant building, studied its history, and evaluated its current condition in order to envision ways to revitalize the site as a contemporary school.

How can a building both react to and affect pedagogy? When a child feels safe and supported, they will take risks and embrace challenges. How do we design spaces that nurture and inspire individual children so they can reach their fullest potential? At the same time, how does a school, as a civic institution, connect to its community and promote fruitful interactions between the students and the community? How do our schools reflect our cultural values and prepare children for their own futures (not just our present)? How do we build a school today that will serve not only this generation of children, but also the next?

Through many scales of engagement—from the site in general to the detail of a brick—students devised careful interventions in the existing structure. An essential aspect of the curriculum prompted students to emphasize low-embodied carbon structural design. In response, projects reused the existing building or elements of it, integrating new materials with low-embodied carbon footprints and thoroughly considering the future use and lifespan of the structure.

The 2021 Spring semester proved to be a transformative one, as we dispersed from our own learning environment—notably, our studio spaces in Avery Hall—to many corners of the globe. But remarkably, we created a new environment across the filigree of the ether: a “fourth teacher” that emerged in the form of a virtual forum in which those key tenants of community, cooperation, and life folded together into a tactile space of our own.

If the purpose of education is to unlock the full potential of the student, what are the key contributors to that end? Toward the articulation of a school design, this studio employed two primary filters: what is a space of learning and where does the school begin and end, if at all. Students explored spatial logics in accordance with the realm of the body and speculated critically between conducive postures, spatial configurations, and sensory stimulation that use existing data to reimagine an optimal learning environment. Students were challenged to express the program organization, speculating critically and imaginatively within and beyond the physical building container.

Integrating school, life, and city, this studio focused on designing for a new type of educational facility that extends its program to double as a community hub for the neighborhood. Given their critical role and physical presence in cities, schools have the unique potential to evolve from isolated educational silos into platforms to interact, learn, and generate meaningful connections for all. In, out, and around, this studio explored how schools can be more, do more, and effectively become more integrated and lively components of the public realm.

The school as a building type presents an added responsibility for the designer: one must not only imagine possible futures but also create environments that can activate the minds of children in unexpected and spontaneous ways—both experientially and intellectually. This studio operates from a basis of energy and resource scarcity by doing as much as possible with as little as possible. Rather than an approach characterized by austerity, however, we attempt to rethink school building from the ground up by questioning basic assumptions that undergird the carbon economy. We are concerned with supply chains, material flows, embodied energy, and life-cycles of building materials. We are also interested in exploring design opportunities presented to us by phased construction, time-based or ephemeral modes of occupancy, material procurement, possible strategies of disassembly, re-use, programmatic flexibility, alternative materials (whether heavy and earthen or lightweight), and novel forms of construction and assembly as avenues for design research. Our site is in New York, yet students are invited to operate with the resourcefulness, efficiencies, flexibilities, and informal systems seen in parts of Asia, Africa, and South America as precedents for design and construction. Could these methods from the global South help us to reimagine ways a school functions both locally and by extension globally? How could the implementation of such strategies define new territories for the school and its site?

In the context of a New York City school today, where open space is at a premium, the available space and time for play are limited. The footprint of a school’s property may allow for a ground level or rooftop playground, and the daily schedule may allow for a meager 20 minute recess period—the minimum required by the Department of Education. Given the known benefits of play on childhood development and well-being, this studio asked: can we build schools that incorporate more integral spaces and opportunities for play? Learning from playgrounds and play objects, how can a building inspire wonder by engaging children in their environment? Within the tight-knit urban fabric and constraints of the project site, expanded space for play must extend beyond the physical ground plane. This studio explored materials and geometry, through the tools of sectional design and physical model-making, to activate volumetric space for play and learning experiences to co-mingle. Students stitched threads of the city’s infrastructure onto the school grounds, and in doing so, fostered opportunities for bridging the unfettered joys of childhood with the joys of adulthood, in hopes of nurturing the next generation of great minds.

The brief for this studio entailed the design of The XR School. The XR School is a New York City public elementary school with a curricular focus on climate change—its causes and the paths to stabilize it. The school building each student designed is envisioned as an integral lesson tool for the students. The studio made extensive use of diagramming to develop and describe the program and the building. Flows of people; energy generation and consumption; vectors of structure, light, and air; program spaces and their relationships to the context; and any other factors defining each project were diagrammed. Isolated diagrams were continually developed through an iterative process provoked by the contamination of each to one another. This culminated in an idealized and multilayered project diagram which guided the development of the school as it was elaborated and made constructible.

Spaces of learning have the utmost opportunity and responsibility to inspire and enlighten. This studio understands buildings through material and spatial agency encompassing nuanced gradients of hard-, soft- and water-scapes, intertwined to support education, community, and regenerative legacy. Architecture and garden are interdependent and associative—healthy and resilient spatial-scapes are experienced temporally through the changes of seasons, interacting with sunlight and moon shadow. Projects negotiate the delicate coexistence among intertwined, oscillating intergenerational groups and individuals, defining and engaging the issues upon which our collective future depends. Urban-ecological challenges—which are human predicaments, really—demand both innovation and progressive perspective. Here, architecture is a proactive participant—making space for reflection and wisdom while fostering new venues and affirmations of social and environmental integrity. Together, the studio defined uncharted orders and priorities to experience space—and one another—on new conceptual levels of possibilities and understandings.

Neurodiversity is the idea that neurological differences such as ADHD, dyslexia, and autism are not errors of nature or products of a toxic modern world, but are instead, the result of natural variation in the human genome. Neurodiversity advocates reject pathologizing difference and call on society to regard neurodivergence as a valuable part of humanity’s genetic legacy while ameliorating the severely disabling aspects. This studio took on Loris Malaguzzi’s prompt, “the environment as the third teacher,” through the lens of neurodiversity recognizing that different nervous systems experience environments very differently. Each student designed a school that integrated both neurotypical and neurodiverse students and explored the potentials of multivalent space.

This studio explored the use of found and readymade objects––including the structure and facade of the former P.S. 64 building, completed in 1906, which was be the site of the project––as a means of challenging the valorization of individual authorship, originality, difficulty, and abstraction in design pedagogy and practice. Specifically, it engaged the logics and material qualities of toys, games, and stories––exploring their literal translation into architecture. We experimented with using toys to make models, games to make drawings, and stories to make buildings. Or with making models that are toys, drawings that are games, and buildings that tell stories. We asked, should an architecture for children look like an architecture for children? Should an architecture for children be presented like an architecture for children? We considered ways in which architecture serves as a didactic tool, which, in its form and material expression, “teaches” users and viewers something. What can, or should, the architecture of a school teach? And how can, or should, it do so?