Where once the campus amenities arms race was waged over luxury dorms and recreation facilities, now colleges and universities are building deluxe structures for the generation of wonderful ideas
What did universities used to do to generate wonderful ideas? Did the previous campus design enable creative thinking and has now become obsolete, thus a new architectural structure to help students think? What parts of society created this shift? TECHNOLOGY!
“Creation Myth”
Not explained in this article. Personal research concluded that the “creation myth” is a story of how Steve Jobs essentially stole the apple computer from Xerox. I do not see how drawing this parallel to M.I.T’s Building helps their argument of generating creative ideas because it is a story of stealing ideas.
Though studies have shown that proximity and conversation can produce creative ideas, there’s little research on the designs needed to facilitate the process
Prompt 5 asks what this article omits, and this is a huge aspect of what is missing from this paper. It talks a lot about a topic with little to no hard evidence of how architecture can enable innovative thinking.
Architecture descriptors:
Resembles the high-tech workplace
Minimally partitioned spaces of the garage and factory
Ramshackle aesthetic
Less polish provides more freedom
Mixing disciplines
Transition zones
Industrial Look
End to privacy
Seating is flexible
Informal lounges
Built in scribble pads
Transparent floors
You are more likely to find a garage door and a 3-D printer than book-lined offices and closed-off classrooms, more likely to huddle with peers at a round table than to go to a lecture hall with seats for 100.
This article omits the administrative side of this form of learning. A lecture hall that is meant to teach an intro class to over 200 kids has different goals than that of a round table. How does this form of learning satisfy these goals? Huge missing part in this reading.
The rationales for these buildings are varied: Employers are dissatisfied with graduates’ preparation, students are unhappy with outdated teaching methods, and colleges want to attract students whose eyes are on postgrad venture capital and whose scalable ideas might come in handy on campus.
Appeal to logos. Very logical reasoning that is hard to argue. The only hole in their logic is its vagueness. Dissatisfied with graduates preparation– what makes them dissatisfied? Outdated teaching methods– what elements of teaching have become ineffective?
So much of contemporary design for innovation involves adding friction to people’s work lives, as unexpected encounters (with people, with different spaces, with art) are supposed to lead to unexpected ideas.
One of the claims of the argument= unexpected encounters lead to unexpected ideas.
This is a hard claim to prove 0r provide evidence for
“Being in bigger interactive spaces encourages expansive thinking, while being in a box of a room encourages box thinking,” said Dan Huttenlocher, founding dean and vice provost at Cornell Tech.
Dan Huttenlocher– appeal to ethos because of his position as founding dean and vice provost at Cornell Tech
“As you begin to understand how people work together, there is an ideal size of collaboration,” said Ung-Joo Scott Lee, principal at Morphosis, the architects. “Beyond five people it is too much of a crowd.”
Bachelor of Science Degree from Cornell University and a Master of Architecture from the University of Michigan– Appeal to ethos
Pixar “Surprise Spaces”
“We didn’t want to have a classroom because that says, ‘In this room you learn, out here you don’t learn.”
Transforming the entire campus into a learning space. Physical walls create literal walls around learning.
The radical restructuring of both curriculum and architecture
Main idea: radical restructuring
The Garage provides cafe, meeting, classroom and workshop space for anyone on campus — a student center with an entrepreneurial purpose, with amenities like 3-D printers, Bluescape interactive screens and design software.
Anyone on campus can go to these spaces, however they are targeted towards specific majors. (STEM, science technology engineering and math)
***design that heightens possibility of interaction***
Arts programs are where students and faculty can more easily engage in the undefined aspects of life
Bringing learning tactics of art students to other areas of studying.
THE PEOPLE WHO GET HIRED ARE THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE IDEAS
This design style prepares more and more students to have ideas. Makes me wonder what ideas i’m not having because i’m not in a school who fosters creative thought!
…draws in majors from across the university, with popular classes that include building your own bicycle.
Generating creativity through more than just space, implementing creative classes also
Kansas universities, has increased tuition 5 percent to make up for the budget cuts. “State funding is dwindling, so we have to be innovative in our financing,”
Innovation everywhere!!! Even in financing.
“I’m on the board of my daughter’s high school, and what they are doing there is taking the existing library, gutting it and turning it into a tech-enablement space,” he said. “The college process may be dumbed down from what they do in high school.”
This article hardly discusses how education has to change outside of college. I recognize that this is not the point of the article, but I do view it as significant information. A student who endures K-12 learning in a traditional learning setting, may have a sort of “learning shock” when entering a university as described in this article.
Alexandra Lange is the architecture critic for Curbed and the author of “Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities.”
Ethos to the author. However, I view this article as secondary research. (Reporting data collected by others)