We cover an array of topics here: click on the categories below to focus on your particular interest, or simply read them as we wrote them.  We promise no linear narrative here.

alternative learning environments: the workshop

alternative learning environments: the workshop

Workshops are about creativity in three dimensions.  Traditionally, schools have offered workshops devoted to wood craft or metal craft or cooking or art or physics or chemistry or more recently, robotics.  We imagine a far more comprehensive, collaborative venue combining all these functions.  The workshop is about invention fueled by knowledge.  It takes the theoretical and makes it tactile.  The workshop is about innovation and problem-solving.  The workshop reminds every student that they are still that creative, playful kindergarten version of themselves, but with more information and some added skills.  The workshop acknowledges that the world has problems, real ones, that require solutions engaging all of the learning modalities and multiple intelligences.  It invites every student to drop pretense and specialties and play with something different.  It is perhaps, a vision for the real world.

alternative learning environments: the war room

alternative learning environments: the situation room

Dr. Strangelove, or how I learned to love the bomb. Stanley Kubrick, director

The flipped classroom offers an opportunity to take advantage of group intelligence and apply it to real problems.  To be successful, it requires a situation room.  That room would immerse participants in relevant data, offer them tools to explore solutions and ramifications, and facilitate group activity.  The institutional classroom in the hands of a very enterprising teacher might look a little like this, but the key to a situation room is the way it brings information together from vast and diverse perspectives: it is a cross-pollinating, collaborative environment that transgresses departmental boundaries.  A situation room will tackle problems both immediate and historic: climate change, slavery, capitalism, border security, poverty.  It may devote itself to one topic for a week or a semester or a year.  Its goal is problem definition, research, analysis, brainstorming, proposed action, and possible results.

Notre Dame B011

alternative learning environments: the tv array

alternative learning environments: the tv array

It's a great, big world out there.  Rarely do we get a powerful sense of connection to the magnitude of that, to the sheer volume of information, transaction, or engagement happening beyond our direct experience.  The TV array offers a curated experience of both volume and diversity.  It can offer us multiple viewpoints on current events, or it can be thematically arranged (french speaking only today...), or it can maximize scope and diversity, but the experience is one of breadth and volume.  It offers the student a position of humbleness to meditate on the world, in a way that their own single channel uncurated computer cannot.  Offering multiple info channels has humble roots, and also high-tech applications:

alternative learning environments: the tent

alternative learning environments: the tent

One thing that the institutional classroom divorces students and teachers from is the outdoors, and the result is fatigue and boredom and frustration for those students requiring more visceral stimulation.  The tent is one possible solution.  Because it is mobile and rapidly deployed, it can support educational safaris to lots of different locations.  Because it is thin and open, it maintains a visceral connection to the outdoors.  Because it is enclosed and offers structure, it can support teaching tools in a way that outdoor venues cannot.  For all these reasons, we feel tents offer a valuable alternative venue for teaching and learning.  Even partially realized, as with open but permanently constructed venues, the visceral connection to the outdoors provides a visceral learning experience.  Here are two examples:

Cambodian Classroom

Atkinson Outdoor Learning Garden Pavilion, Portland, Oregon

alternative learning environments: the speaker's corner

alternative learning environments: the speaker's corner

We fervently believe that every student in high school should be required to stand up at least once in front of the entire school and argue for something.  Anything.  In public.  We also believe that every student should be required to participate in at least one public debate, a duel between two opposing positions requiring rhetorical skills, research and some measure of commitment and passion.  The Speaker's Corner is the venue serving both goals.  By institutionalizing the venue, we hope to institutionalize the activity as well, another small step in our campaign to bring Rhetoric back as an important and required skill at the high school grade levels.

Central St. Martins College, Lichfield, England

alternative learning environments: the sandbox

alternative learning environments: the sandbox

When we consider the many different intelligences, and specifically how to make learning more tactile, we speculate about the sandbox.  It is an obvious and useful tool for socializing young children, teaching them cooperation and allowing them wide latitude to invent and pretend and imagine, but it isn't obvious that it presents a useful learning tool to the brooding and jaded 2-12th grader.  In the 70s we saw corporate experimentation with sandboxes in the boardroom or office, but they have given way to ping pong tables and pool tables and virtual outlets.  Yet, we still enjoy sitting on the beach and running sand through our hands in contemplation of whatever obsesses us at the moment, and that simple tactile act suggests something useful.  In addition, the fluidity of the sandbox, as it allows groups and individuals to form and reform to pursue projects and flights of imagination suggests a very interesting and potentially useful dynamic.  A classroom working on different aspects of a problem, with students circulating freely as they detect initiatives of interest might optimize individual participation and minimize marginal bench warming.  It is an awfully speculative proposition, but here two images that pique our interest:

Holtzendorff Teaching With Technology Experimental Classroom, Clemson University, affectionately called "the Sandbox"

Rennaissance Phuket Resort, Thailand

alternative learning environments: the big map

alternative learning environments: the big map

Maps communicate powerful messages about the world, but too often they are small and serve to distance us from the world rather than bring us closer.  A change in scale, and the opportunity to walk on the earth it portrays instead of facing the image on a wall creates a far more visceral interaction with the material.  We are extremely conscious of the many different projections available, and rather partial to the Peters projection over the venerable Mercator, but don't feel the details should obscure the opportunity.  A large map of any projection offers a chance to demonstrate all kinds of information about different countries comparatively, stacking coins for example to demonstrate relative GDP or average income, or having students plan and execute virtual trips, or letting them study and talk about the countries they come from or visit.  Too often, we encounter people with no clue about the world beyond the United States: the big map is a visceral way to connect them with the rest of the world.

alternative learning environments: the library cafe

alternative learning environments: the library cafe

Housing Works Bookstore Café, Crosby Street, NYC

Nothing puts us to sleep faster than a difficult book.  Studying.  Trying to understand something difficult.  Study circles, obliging and mentally superior friends, discussions and debates, and yes, a nice beverage or snack, these are the answer but one rarely offered at high schools.  Study halls however, are a long-standing high school institution, and the library cafe is a powerful way to make them more productive.  Informal, resource-rich and caffeinated or not, it beats sitting at home alone to get that homework done.  For those of you scandalized by the thought of coffee stained resources, we suggest that heavily used and margin annotated and graffiti marred books have more to offer than the pristine volume nobody reads.  We always appreciated the notes in our used textbooks from last year's students, and often learned a lot from them.

Lamont Library Café, Harvard University

alternative learning environments: kiosks

alternative learning environments: kiosks

Steelcase Creativity Lab: Informal Brainstorming and Problem Solving Environment

We design modern workplaces to encourage random encounters and ad hoc creativity, but we don't encourage that behavior in our schools.  We should.  We teach the basics of our traditional subjects, but rarely engage in relevant, cutting edge problem solving.  We should.  We say we want cross-disciplinary cooperation, but don't say how or where that should happen.  We should.  The public kiosk is a venue suited to all these goals.  Imagine it near or in the lunchroom or student union or store or teacher's and students lounge.  It requires monitoring and instigation and participation from a significant cross-section of the school, but it offers the opportunity to pose and consider modern problems in modern ways.  Sometimes its just a whiteboard on the outside of a conference room, instead of the inside.

Neustar Headquarters, Washington DC designed by Roel Krabbendam, imagine RED

alternative learning environments: the story booth

alternative learning environments: the story booth

Intimate, Wired, Acoustically Isolated Storytelling and Recording Environment

We believe that one extraordinarily neglected yet absolutely vital skill for success in the modern world is the ability to speak: to tell a story.  That story may be a position, or it may be an explanation or it may be a dramatic narrative, but it will require speaking in a compelling fashion with care and preparation in advance.  Learning to tell a story is why we believe a story booth is so important.  We see it not just as a way to practice speaking skills alone, but also as a way to work privately with a mentor or teacher without embarrassment or fear.  Rhetoric was once a required subject, and we are on a mission to bring it back: the Story Booth is one important tool.  It will allow you to record your efforts, play it back for critique, archive it if useful, transmit it if desirable, and allow for remote communication with distant lands since the infrastructure is already there.  The latter notion was explored recently in New York City, where residents were invited to connect with people in a similarly connected Story Booth in Europe and share whatever came to mind.  The possibility of sharing your experience, but also of challanging preconceptions of the "Other", that distant and strange person perhaps actually no different from us, is a compelling one.

alternative learning environments: the garden

alternative learning environments: the garden

The Hollenback Community Garden, Brooklyn, New York

We believe gardens offer important characteristics worthy of consideration for teaching: they are outdoors (and very hard to fall asleep in), they are rich in visual, tactile, olefactory and kinethetic opportunities, and they require attention.  There is no passivity in taking responsibility for a garden.  Teaching outdoors is nothing particularly new, but we know it is rarely employed, rarely fully supported by teaching tools (outdoor smart boards anyone?), and rarely manageable: how do teachers take responsibility for, set-up and utilize such a space?  Yet, we have never forgotten the following image, of a classroom we encountered in Agadez, Niger in 2007 on a  trip across the Sahara Desert:

Outdoor Classroom, Agadez, Niger 2007

What surprised us, given the lack of resources, was the engagement of the students with the teachers and with each other, the utter lack of drowsiness, and the critique of our own preconceptions, after years of designing both public and private schools, of what teaching and learning required.  A board, some shade, some tablets...

A garden begins to offer some of the primal emotive qualities the traditional neutral classroom lacks.  It also offers a curriculum (botany, biology, general science, culinary arts), a lesson in responsibility and discipline, and the possibility of a kinethetic experience that might appeal to many students disenfranchised by gym and by sports.  For schools seeking additional income streams, it also offers a public venue that will ennoble any number of private rituals, from bar mitzvahs to weddings.  Here is one example of a teaching garden:

alternative learning environments: the digital environment

alternative learning environments: the digital environment

There is no doubt that electronic media are more and more an important part of teaching and learning.  For the mature or self-directed student, it is a powerful way to learn, and often a visceral one.  What interests us more, however, is how we can take an often unmediated medium and apply it to the classroom, where teacher involvement and the possibility of engaging groups of students using multiple intelligences can create unforgettable experiences.  This image of SMALLab in particular engages us as that kind of digital environment:

SMALLab is a proponent of Embodied Learning, making learning kinesthetic, collaborative, and multimodal.  It embodies (sorry) many of the characteristics we are seeking in our exploration of alternative learning environments.

alternative learning environments: the campfire

alternative learning environments: the campfire

We maintain that much of teaching and learning, especially at its best, is centered on story-telling.  Campfires especially, help to bring them alive.  There is something about engaging a group visually as you tell a story that makes the presentation compelling and often unforgettable, and we think classrooms have something to learn here.  Granted, a toasty fire on a cold, dark night invites reverie more than analysis, but we believe focusing attention and visual engagement are the key points.  Here's how a campfire might look when it is re-imagined as a classroom:

alternative learning environments: the bar restaurant

alternative learning environments: the bar-restaurant

Restaurant Eguzki, Barcelona, Spain

Here are the characteristics of a bar-restaurant that we feel offers a powerful model for learning: these spaces are Flexible, Partially Mediated Multi-format Environments focused on a Menu.  Imagine a learning space that allows students to work singly or in groups.  The students chose what works best for them. The curriculum (or menu) is defined at the beginning of the semester, but the pace at which students work is not and for some subjects broken down into units, even the order of the units studied may be up to the student.  Thus the student can browse and select what he wants to work on, within a range taking some control of his own learning.  We admit the idea is not completely new: in the late 1970s, in a tiered classroom space at Acton-Boxborough Regional High School in Acton, Massachusetts, one of us learned chemistry in exactly this fashion from a curriculum written by, among others, a very charismatic teacher named Catherine Capone.  The experience has not faded from memory in 40 years.  The teacher plays a vital role in this paradigm: inspiring, commenting, supporting, challenging and giving examples to both individuals and groups of students that make the material come alive.  The bar component is commonplace at the Apple store, which by the way also offers tables where groups can learn about there products: it is a bar-restaurant learning space disguised as a store.

learning environments: the flipped classroom

learning environments: the flipped classroom

Nothing made me more bitter about school than lectures with the lights on.
Lectures with the lights off simply put me to sleep.
Neither contributed much to my education.  

The flipped classroom is the answer.  

Instead of doing individual work (listening and taking notes) in a group setting, the flipped classroom gives students group work (projects, discussions, games) in a group setting.  The opportunity when we think about how to make the classroom experience truly meaningful: the classroom itself is no longer bound by the lecture model or configuration.  No sage on the stage means no stage: the classroom is liberated from historic models and available for complete reconsideration.  The question becomes: what can be done to make the classroom experience as visceral, as memorable, as impactful as possible?  With a flipped classroom model, we can completely reconceive the classroom, stop thinking about it as a "room", and focus on environments that support and enhance profound learning experience.

Department of appropriate attribution: http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom/
 

learning environments: flow

the learning environment: flow

From a recent article in CNN Money, lauding a new book: The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance, by journalist Steven Kotler, pointing out that peak mental states are triggered by a rich environment.  Our take-away: Peak educational performance will be triggered by rich, complex, novel educational spaces.  If we are going to take education seriously and make the most of what science has to tell us, then the 21st century school will not be business as usual, neutral lecture rooms.

"There are 15 flow triggers that are covered in The Rise of Superman. For example, you want a very specific challenge-to-skills ratio. The challenge needs to be 4% greater than the skills you bring to the table. We took that number and ran with it, and tried to test it in various scenarios, and we have found it's very effective.

A rich environment is another trigger. A rich environment is a fancy way of saying lots of novelty, lots of complexity, and lots of unpredictability. Google (GOOG) is great at this. They talk about 10x improvement and not 10% improvement. When you're asking for 10x improvement, you're throwing out all the existing assumptions, and you have to start radically new. You're massively increasing the amount of novelty, complexity, and unpredictability in your employees' work life."

From: The Science Behind Peak Human Performance, Anne VanderMey, CNN Money, March 17, 2014

approach: visceral and inspiring learning environments

approach: visceral and inspiring learning environments

The modern classroom...as neutral as ever, as drained of psychological content as ever, as boring as ever.  Notice the utter passivity of these potentially vibrant, active kids.  30 years after leaving public school, we remember the rooms far more viscerally than the people: arid, airless, draining.  It suggests at the very least that we pay attention to the environment as much as we pay attention to the lesson plan.

Two classrooms in Agadez Niger, 2006, one on each side of a teaching wall, in the shade of a small bosque.  No resources, no enclosure, no one sleeping, incredible engagement.  You can see the earthen bricks for a future building in the background.

School is too often boring.  Emotion is too often stifled or viewed as a problem, environments are desaturated to the point of complete neutrality, and too many buildings give the word "institutional" a bad reputation.

When we think of teaching as telling stories, and learning as experiencing the world through those stories, then we have to ask, how do we get students viscerally involved in stories?  Furthermore, how do we inspire students to create stories, to make their life an amazing story?  Is the hermetic vacuum of a classroom where stories are born?

Given our understanding of multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1999), and given our perception that learning is transactional with the learning environment (Dent-Read and Zukow-Goldring, 1997, Wagman and Miller, 2003), we propose an approach to the design of educational environments that acknowledges their active, cognitive impact and power.

Here than are 14 environmental typologies we believe worth considering for the school environment as an alternative to the neutral classroom.  We'll explore each typology individually in future posts, but leave you with this image: of a school in which teacher's no longer own their classroom, but instead rotate their class among a wide array of individual learning experiences, a host of unique learning environments appealing to the many different intelligences of their many students.

Here are the 14 typologies:

1. The Bar-Restaurant

2. The Campfire

3. The Digital Environment

4. The Garden

5. The Interview Booth

6. The Kiosk

7. The Library Cafe

8. The Map Room

9. The Sandbox

10. The Speaker's Corner

11. The Tent

12. The TV Array

13. The War Room

14. The Workshop

Gardner, Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century, Basic Books, New York (1999)
Wagman and Miller, Nested Reciprocities: The Organism–Environment System in Perception–Action and Development,  (2003)
Dent-Read, C. and P. Zukow-Goldring, “Introduction: Ecological Realism, Dynamic Systems, and Epigenetic Systems Approaches to Development”, in C. Dent-Read and P. Zukow-Goldring (eds.), Evolving Explanations of Development: Ecological Approaches to Organism-Environment Systems, American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, (1997)

approach: visceral and inspiring learning experiences

approach: visceral and inspiring learning experiences

As we spent more and more time analyzing school projects and working with educators, we recognized that the conversation was mired in what was rather than what could be.  Student population projections, state authorized reimbursable venues, and traditional teaching methodologies all froze the exploration before it could produce anything but what we've always built and always seen.

There is no doubt that the neutral 800 or 900sf classroom, the gym/cafeteria/auditorium/library array, the playground layout, the sports venues and the "office": administrative spaces, nurses space and storage, all have served us moderately well, some of it even remembered fondly by the alumni of the system.  We think, however, that the status quo is more of a budgeting and planning convenience than an inspiration to the parents, students and teachers.  In a world where creativity is recognized as a significant indicator of future success, and where a rich landscape of different learning modalities and intelligences are at work, the notion of a "neutral" classroom seems like a cop-out.

Herewith, our list of learning experiences we wish were commonplace, and better served by the educational venues we build:

1. The Race

We don't mean this literally: schools already build tracks.  We are talking about a situation where students or teams of students compete against each other in pursuit of a singular goal.  That experience: of going head to head, of focusing on a singular result,, of bringing all of your creativity to bear on being faster or better, that experience is indelible.

The race in Geography could be a virtual effort to travel from one place to another using existing timetables and other web-based resources, progress tracked on a world map.  That race requires a maproom, one of a catalog of alternative learning venues we'll cover in a future post. The race in Math could be an effort by teams to solve pressing real-world problems mathematically, and the venue may require a campfire or a purely digital environment.  The bottom line: racing should be a regular thing, and not just in gym or after school.  It can be a powerful learning experience.

2. The Safari

Safari's require leaving behind the habitat you know very well and feel completely comfortable in to enter into a rich, alien environment filled with interesting and even potentially dangerous objects or animals of study.  Safaris bring you in direct contact with the natural world.  Schools already offer "field trips", an excellent example of a Safari.  We prefer to think of Safari's however, as something that can occur regularly and frequently, without leaving the school grounds.  Our design for the Tucson Waldorf School, for example, included a distant classroom and extensive garden venues that afforded the opportunity for classes to move out of their classrooms, no busses or parental permission slips required.

3. The Meditation

The meditation demands silence and attention, two commodities in short supply in our students' hectic lives and therefore all the more valuable.  In a world where attention spans are demonstrably decreasing, the importance of exercising our ability to concentrate for extended periods seems obvious.  Schools should be demanding it of their students, and supporting them with the appropriate venues.

To students, perhaps most of them, meditation might be torture.  No electronic tethers, no friendly banter, only themselves and perhaps a koan, or perhaps an "altar" or focal point. 

4. The Duel

The duel has some qualities of the Race, the winning and losing for example, but it is much more personal, and highly visceral.  The duel could be a gymnasium filled with chess boards, or a series of one on one debates, or a contest in any field whatsoever.  A duel can be a singular event, or many duels in parallel.  The key to a duel is that the participants are on display: the duel is a very public event typically reserved for the middle of town.  Duels require spectators.

5. The Bullfight

The bullfight pits a student or team not against another student or team, but against an implacable inhuman force or problem.  The bull can be an obstacle course, a minefield, a computer game, a math problem, a difficult situation (accomplish the following 10 tasks in this room of non-English speakers), or any number of possible challenges.  Again, spectators create the experience, even when it is simply your classmates.  This kind of learning experience is, of course, not uncommon even in a neutral classroom environment.  We believe, however, that the venue makes the experience.  It was in thinking about bullfights that we began to imagine a campus of unique venues among which classes rotate.  

Today we are in the bullring: we will learn French in a manner commensurate with the room.

In this manner, teachers are motivated and empowered to teach to a multiplicity of intelligences, a lecture rarely welcome in a bullring that could instead invite a spectacle.

6. The Swim

The swim is complete immersion in an alien environment, forcing the student to figure out survival strategies without the usual support structures to enable disengagement. The swim is entering a room where no one speaks English.  The swim is being presented a board full of alien inscription, math for example, and being required to interpret or explain.  The swim is a garden in which students are told to find and identify and solve for pathogens.  The swim is a historical exercise in which students are required to immerse themselves in an alien culture in order to understand and explain a certain mindset in a visceral way, 1936 Germany for example, or 2014 Washington DC.  The swim invites a moment of sheer, visceral panic, in which the enormity of the distance to land is fully understood and acknowledged.  The power is in overcoming that moment to plot a survival strategy.

7. The Climb

The climb is a challenging path to a singular, well-understood and immensely rewarding goal.  It can be an individual or team effort.  The difference between a climb and a term paper is the acknowledged awesomeness of the ultimate achievement, the reward sufficient to motivate students to unparalleled effort.  Some examples of climbs include: pursuing scientific problems no one has solved ever...in the world, solving a cool engineering problem and seeing it implemented, building apps, pursuing a patent, implementing a new program in school, running for office...class treasurer even...building robots...

Climbs demand individual excellence, but it can also build teams.  Climbers are often roped together, and climbers often rely on guides and belayers.  Climbers help each other.  Climbing is an incredibly visceral experience, an unforgettable experience, and a powerful model for learning lessons students will never forget.

8. The Apprenticeship

For students to experience adults pursuing excellence: that's an unforgettable and eye-opening event.  We are not particularly concerned about the one-on-one relationship, though this is undeniably powerful. We are more interested in the visceral nature of the relationship, the experience of working with an adult, and the rich possibility of learning by doing.

9. Storytelling

Stories are essential to teaching and learning.  By providing narrative and context and engaging protagonists, stories escape the trap of rote learning.  Even memorization experts agree: the key to memorizing long lists lies in tying each element on the list to a cohesive narrative.  We might examine therefore how we can bolster the impact of stories by building contexts as powerful as a campfire on a beach.

We believe schools should be built to support and encourage these powerful learning experiences.  Neutral classrooms add little, and too often drain completely the emotion out of learning experiences.  We can do better.

case history: a new school campus

case history: a new school campus

This is the story of a beautiful Sonoran Desert site adjacent to a wash flowing down from the Finger Rocks north of Tucson, Arizona, donated to the Tucson Waldorf School.

The site floods, and large volumes of sand get deposited when it does, and the site is a protected landscape, a rural historic landscape certified by the Department of the Interior, meaning a huge swath of it facing the main road is highly scrutinized for adherence to an historic mythology.

This beautiful 10 acre site was donated to the Tucson Waldorf School, and on it they envisioned building a new campus.  We were fortunate to become the designers.

We assembled a team for an integrated project delivery, including mechanical, electrical, plumbing, structural, civil, landscape and construction management consultants, and explored the project with the client in extensive charettes involving the entire school community. Discussions focused on sustainability and anthroposophy, a philosophy articulated by Rudolph Steiner in the early 20th century upon which the Waldorf system is based.  Regarding architecture, the philosophy emphasizes dialectics or juxtaposing opposites and eschews right angles, but a detailed explanation is impossible here.

Early explorations of the site plan assumed entry to the site from the main road, placing parking and driveway in the protected landscape on the main road and pushing the school back away from the street noise.  An early metaphor about beehives and the anthroposophic injunction against right angles suggested a planning grid based on hexagons, which drove these early schemes.

Ultimately however, the addition to the program of a soccer field forced a complete rethinking of the site plan, the soccer field could only go into the protected streetfront area, and entry to the site was moved back to the side street:

The heart of this final conceptual site plan was the construction of four islands, one each for administration, early childhood, grades 1-8, and group functions (auditorium/gymnasium/support).  The islands would raise the buildings and play areas out of the floodplain, and would be connected with bridges to highlight their independence. Classrooms are pushed to the back, quieter part of the site, and the athletic and performance venue faces the main road.  We imagined school events this visible to the community driving by would be a tremendous calling card for the school.  The plan also articulated a three phase construction plan: Phase 1 in orange, Phase 2 in blue, and Phase 3 in pink.  With a site concept in place, we began schematic design of phase 1.

Our perception that in early childhood especially, children love to occupy corners suggested keeping the hexagonal rooms that were originally generic placeholders.  The hexagons were exceptional as rooms, and also wonderfully fluid in clusters, making this an important decision. They also avoided right angles, the anthroposophic concern nicely addressed.

 In the upper grades too, the hexagons allowed for straightforward orthogonal seating but offered apses for a teacher's desk and secondary activities.  Here we warped the hexagons in order to expand the teaching wall, and opened the rooms fully to the site behind the student seating to allow for connection without creating distraction.  Lockers and toilet facilities occupy the courtyard around which the Grades classrooms cluster.

The administration building proved quite straightforward, serving as an entry to the three other clusters and the site, maintaining a secure site entrance, and establishing a home base for the staff.

Three dimensionally, we experimented with a number of different building sections.  Our objectives were to provide a superior building envelope, maximize daylight, address anthroposophic concerns, and create a superior teaching environment.  Our experience in the Sahara Desert had proven the superiority of earth as a desert building medium, and rammed earth was our original intent.

Advice from the contractor regarding cost and constructibility led us to steel or wood frames with structural insulated panel (SIP) skins topped with stucco.  Extensive shading, sloped walls and columns to avoid right angles, and a subdued desert color palette were additional objectives.

Delivery of the schematic design package, consisting also of input from each consultant and a cost estimate from the contractor, was met with concern by the Grades teachers who were unconvinced by the hexagonal classrooms.  We produced an extensive comparison of different options, and decided ultimately as a group that the original design served them best.

At this point, key members of the Board of Directors left the project and the school, including most significantly, the head of the Board and key driver of the project.  The cost estimate came in very high, but there was no opportunity to explore construction options or scope changes that might bring the project in line. The new head of the Board had a very different vision for the school and another architect to carry it out.  A year later, the school built some modest classroom buildings that eliminated any possibility of our plan coming to fruition, and so we chalk this one up to experience and that realm of truly exceptional possibilities that will never be fulfilled.