This past Wednesday (4/16) I traveled with a few fellow students interested in Architecture up to Cal Poly for about 4 hours of collaboration and team work with real 3rd year Architecture students. It was a really amazing and eye opening experience of both college life and what really goes on in their studio. Coming in, I already felt welcome and like a fellow colleague. Also, I came with the assumption that it would just be another class with the typical student relationships, but I couldn't be more wrong. They are truly one big family. I could sense just how connected they were with each other because it is similar to being on a team, spending the bulk of your day together. They would tell us about how much fun they have in the studio even when they are hard at work at 2 in the morning, with other classes in just 6 hours.
After we ate, we had a discussion about what makes students actually want to come to school, and if it were up to us how would we design the school of the future. We sat down in groups of 4 and they should us their previous designs, and they asked us for critique. All I could say was, "its too linear, it needs to be diverse" basically the end result would be a school with classrooms of movable walls, everything on the Internet and readily available, and open to the outside world. The classroom of the future needs to be diverse, to serve students in the way that they learn best, to make learning easier and more natural. There were some other radical ideas such as slides instead of stairs, or a tree house for a place to read, trying to replicate the way that children see the world, which may be a key to why they learn so well.
They taught me that Architecture isn't just designing a space, it is creating a space to serve for both form and function and that "codes" aren't any excuse for bad design. This is a philosophy that could be applied to anything, meaning that the things that must be shouldn't be a limit.
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