reading summaries

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Summary of Scholl & Gulwadi: Recognizing Campus Landscapes as Learning Spaces

Link to article: here

Scholl and Gulwadi’s piece on campus landscapes focuses on how the environment surrounding college students influences their performance in school. The article begins by stating that college is a “stimulating and demanding time in a student’s life” that requires “direct, focused attention.” Therefore, college officials should take care to ensure that there are areas on campus with “potential [to replenish] cognitive functioning for attentional fatigued students.”

The article continues to discuss the historical context of college campuses, explaining that American campuses as they were in the 1770’s were “self-sufficient and often built in rural locations,” whereas campuses today are less focused on preserving green, open spaces than they are on new structures and facilities.

In the 3rd section of the paper, Scholl and Gulwadi explain the psychological benefits of being exposed to “green nature,” such as “a chance to rest and replenish,” which can in turn benefit the overall academic state of college students. Therefore, Scholl and Gulwadi deem it essential to provide students with open spaces to help replenish their “learning mechanisms.”

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Summary of Sarah Schindler’s “Architectural Exclusion”

Article: here

Sarah Schindler’s piece on architectural exclusion highlights the ways our built environment has been used to further racial and class segregation. Schindler draws our attention to how architecture can subtly influence the environment in a way that most people don’t recognize or think about, allowing it to slip past regulation and avoid legal consequence. Sometimes, even physical barriers were set in place to keep “undesirable people” out, such as in the case of Robert Moses’s Long Island bridges that were designed to “hang low so that the twelve-foot tall buses in use at the time could not fit under them.” Section 1, Part B clarifies that “[a]lthough regulation through architecture is just as powerful as law, it is less identifiable and less visible to courts, legislators, and potential plaintiffs.”

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Schindler Summary Class Work

Architectural exclusion is rarely addressed in legal courts. Residential areas are generally designed in a way to make them less available to poor people and people of color, and the “racial meaning” of a place provide a way for authority figures to effectively make decisions about who “belongs” in a place and who does not. Despite several authors drawing attention to these issues, “law and lawmakers habitually overlook the way that the built environment functions as an express tool of exclusion.” Although architectural regulation is as effective as law in separating people by class or race, it is less obvious and distinctive to courts – even when the segregated outcome is intended, officials tend not to see these actions as needing regulation.

Julianne Register, Jennyfer Chica, Ayman Vaid, Brianna Reynolds