"Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance."
--T.H. White, The Once and Future King

Who removed the classrooms? Apparently, the Danish government did. In 2005, the Danish government established a new vision for the secondary school reform. This pedagogical reform boldly promotes innovation and self-directed learning in the Danish education system by recognizing this millennium's shift to an ideas-based global economy.

3XN, an architectural firm based in Copenhagen, responded to the government’s vision by creating a radically different learning environment for Ørestad College. Organized around a central staircase and atrium, the boomerang-shaped floor plates spin and shift like a camera shutter to create four distinct learning zones. The rotating floor plates create a horizontal flow of spaces, which seems infinite given the transparency of the exterior skin and the central atrium's verticality.

Read more of Trung Le’s thoughts on Fast Company’s design website, here.

Image © Adam Mørk / 3XN

As a follow-up to our post yesterday, check out this poignant article from Tom Friedman’s NYT column.

A teaser quote:

“We know what works, and it’s not a miracle cure. It is the whatever-it-takes-tenacity of the Geoffrey Canadas; it is the no-excuses-seriousness of the KIPP school (Knowledge is Power Program) founders; it is the lead-follow-or-get-out-of-the-way ferocity of the Washington and New York City school chancellors, Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein. And it is the quiet heroism of millions of public and charter school teachers and parents who do put kids first by implementing the best ideas, and in so doing make their schools just a little bit better and more accountable every day — so no Americans ever again have to play life bingo with their kids, or pray to be rescued by Superman.”

You’ve heard everyone talking about it. It’s coming to a theater near you on September 24—“Waiting for ‘Superman’”.

Watch the interview with the film’s director Davis Guggenheim below.

But let’s quit waiting and take action. Pledge now or learn about the cause on the film’s—err, movement’s—website.

Listen to this NPR podcast featuring a Baltimore summer camp that teaches opera to 11-, 12- and 13-year-olds. For four weeks, campers received lessons in music, acting, dance, lighting, and costume and set design. Trigger the senses!

You can read the full story here.

Idea 70: “Create a movement.” Detroit Public Schools has done just that. According to Leo Burnett, who co-created the campaign, in March 2009, DPS was facing bankruptcy, a $305 million deficit, declining enrollment and the closing of 29 schools. The loss of thousands of students would result in millions in lost funding. DPS needed the support of Detroit residents—they needed a movement. The campaign ended up generating the $49 million necessary for DPS to remain financially viable. We’re inspired.

This video questions whether social media is a passing fad or a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

Check out our facebook page to see which side of the debate we fall on!

Last month OWP/P | Cannon Design hosted Open Hand Studio Meet and Match, an event designed to introduce designers looking to make a difference in their communities to non-profit organizations in need of design services. The event included structured presentations, highlighting past successful partnerships between designers and non-profits, as well as informal mingling, meeting and matching.

Here is a video of Homer Bryant, the founder and creative director of the Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center, talking about working with OWP/P | Cannon Design on promotional materials and design concepts for the center’s new space:

In 2006, Josh Thompson, an avid surfer and father of two, was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Josh and his family turned their personal pain into proactive community-mobilization; the Thompson family organized an annual fundraiser at the Virginia Beach oceanfront, dedicated to curing the disease that Josh fights every day. Their fundraiser has broken ALS fundraising-records, raising over 3 million dollars in their first two years.

This year, building on their previous success and overwhelming community support, the family designed a beachfront playground that is 100% handicap accessible – the first of its kind in America. The idea came to Josh’s Dad, Bruce Thompson, when the family wanted to go to the beach, but Josh has to stay behind because of the difficulty of safely getting a wheelchair across the sand and to the water’s edge.

Bruce Thompson approached the City of Virginia Beach with his idea for a beach park and playground for every’BODY.’ Land, design services and construction fees were donated to create the park, including signage design by Chris Hayes, vice president of environmental graphic design at Cannon Design. The park's grand opening took place May 22, 2010.

“I just feel it's inevitable that there will have to be change. The only question is whether we're going to do it starting now, or whether we're going to wait for catastrophe.” – Alvin Toffler

We live in a global economy, unquestionably. The common metaphor, pioneered by Thomas Friedman is that “the world is flat.” Technology and a less expensive knowledge-based workforce in countries like India, Brazil and Vietnam have leveled the economic gap between the developing world and western countries. An alternate view, held by urban theorist Richard Florida, seems more compelling to me. He argues that the world is not flat but “spiky.” The “spikes” are the world’s cities, and these urban centers are the critical components that will lead to a better balance between our limited planetary resources and the rapidly expanding human population.

More than half of the human race lives in a city. This figure will rise to 70% by the year 2050. Florida cites the statistic that together New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston have a bigger economy than all of China. These urban centers are supported by a diversity of interconnected systems and infrastructure that enhance the human condition (i.e. employment, culture, housing, education, transportation, public safety, healthcare, energy and technology). Given the population density and critical mass of economic, social and intellectual capital in cities, they naturally become innovation hubs. Furthermore, hubs like London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, Chicago, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Singapore and Los Angeles are dynamically interconnected with each other.

But there is always a weak link, and in this instance, the weakest link in many of the leading urban economies is preK-12 education. Education is critical to a thriving urban center, so why are urban education systems in distress? Better yet: What can we do to change this fate? What does an urban preK-12 physical environment look like in the third millennium?

Read Le’s suggestions for redesigning education within an urban fabric on Fast Company’s website, here.

I have a few comments on The Third Teacher, especially regarding Idea 9 "Let the sunshine in. And the gray skies too...."

Of course you remember the famous Louis Kahn quote, about schools beginning "with a man under a tree, who did not know he was a teacher, discussing his realization with a few, who did not know they were students."

But you might not recall that he went on to say (more than once, I'm sure – he often repeated himself – but, apparently, in his 1973 Pratt Institute lecture, “Between Silence and Light”):

"You get an order from the school board that says, 'We have a great idea. We should not put windows in the school, because the children need wall space for their paintings, and also windows can distract from the teacher.' Now, what teacher deserves that much attention? I'd like to know. Because after all, the bird outside, the person scurrying for shelter in the rain, the leaves falling from the tree, the clouds passing by, the sun penetrating: these are all great things. They are lessons in themselves. Windows are essential to the school. You are made from light, and therefore you must live with the sense that light is important. Such a direction from the school board telling you what life is all about must be resisted. Without light there is no architecture."

The Third Teacher is a beautiful book, and it appears to be a finished product, in that we have an attractive black and "Revolutionary red" cover (not unlike Vignelli's Oppositions covers, for example), wonderful graphic design of both text and of visual images – some of which (like the butterflies and goldfish) are just there to pull the reader into the text – and an apparently stable framework of concepts, chronicles, reports, case studies, guides, interviews and workshops interspersed with the "79 Ideas".

So, I began to think about the presentation of all of the stuff in between Ideas 1 and 79 (I didn't read every word; I read large chunks of it and skimmed almost all of the rest) and I realized that, on the first 10 pages of The Third Teacher – with text-as-frame/text-as-infill (or subtext-within-text) – most of the "infill" consisted of quotations, or else statements of some statistical facts (essentially, a quotation as well). Then I noticed the two-page spreads with a central graphic (butterflies, goldfish, a wad of paper, a "school-crossing" sign) were also filled with quotations or statements of statistical fact. Then I realized the workshop pages had quotations from the kids. Then I noticed that most of the context/concept/guide/precedent "folios" were quotations from other sources. Of course, the interviews consist of quotations, in a less fragmentary form.

So maybe it's not really a finished product, but, rather, a work-in-progress.

Therefore, one of the things that struck me about the book is its kinship with The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin's incomplete, posthumously-published work-in-progress that was never formally organized into a finished book; the 30 or 40 or so "folios" found together were, however, organized by theme/topic (by Benjamin). As is, it is a collection of fragments – 90% quotes and 10% Benjamin's commentary, more or less – a work-in progress, a research project for a book. But who knows what the finished book would have been like?

So, in many ways, it is a Benjaminian research project, a work-in-progress. Which is fine, because the subject matter is continually evolving and, education is, by its very nature, a work-in-progress – an ongoing research project.

And having Bruce Mau involved is especially clever because, as I well remember from the Massive Change exhibition at the MCA, he and his colleagues are very good at making the infinite seem finite (and vice-versa).

So, it's a very clever book and, ultimately, in concert with the website, The Third Teacher is, I think, a very useful and important book, much of which, like Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language (which is referenced), or Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities, is really just common sense – stuff that should be obvious to any K-12 architect, teacher, student or principal. But the brilliance of the book is in its stating the obvious.

And so, I return to Idea 9, "Let the sunshine in." How did we ever get to the point where the school boards (and the parents and voters and taxpayers that comprise them) thought it made sense to have schools without windows? The fact that that idea took hold, however – all over the U.S., in suburbs as well as the inner city, regardless of region or climate – shows the urgency of stating the obvious and trying to restore common sense to the conversation.

Which is probably as revolutionary an idea as the "Vignelli/revolution red" color scheme might indicate.