Architecture 2030 and NY Academy of Sciences Call on Colleges To Cancel Classes!
by Kenny Luna, North Babylon, NY on 02.11.07
Are you being trained for the world you will inherit? That’s the question being posed on February 20, 2007 during a live web-cast from Noon-3:30p.m. EST by Architecture 2030, and hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences. They’re calling it the 2010 Imperative Global Emergency Teach-In, and focusing on global warming and climate change during an interactive web-cast broadcast live from New York. All told it’s expected to reach more than 500,000 students, faculty, deans and working professionals in the fields of architecture, planning and design across both North and South America. And why cancel regular classes for the day? Well, that way you’ll be able to shift focus to include the teach-in as a substitute in a venue that may make it easier for even more students and staff to take part; and with the impressive list of schools, businesses, and government offices already signed up you certainly won’t find yourself alone. In fact, some are even canceling regular activities for the entire day to focus their efforts around the event itself
What’s their goal? Well, the groups involved recognize that to successfully combat both global warming and world resource depletion, ecological literacy simply must become a central theme of design education. However they also realize that the interdependent relationship between ecology and design is virtually absent in many college curricula today, even as we face enormous environmental challenges that people entering the design field will need to find ways to solve. Indeed, a major transformation of the academic design community simply must start now. So they’ve set ambitious goals, liking working to ensure that this year all design studio problems include the parameters of engaging the environment in a way that dramatically reduces or eliminates the need for fossil fuel, then moving on to achieve complete ecological literacy integration into design education by 2010, while working to achieve a carbon-neutral design school campus in that same year by implementing sustainable design strategies, generating on-site renewable power, and through the purchase of renewable energy credits… Ultimately, they’re looking to change the world of design education for the better, with the hopes of making our world a more sustainable place. To join them register here before working to organize a central location on your campus, and then remember to tune in!
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Well this is a really great thing, and I'm glad that someone is taking the initiative to stick this so massively in any educational curriculum. Is there going to be a way one can watch it after it takes place? I won't be able to watch it as it happens, but would still like to see what's going on.
My co-blogger and I just organized our high school's participation. I'm excited to see this mentioned here!
Well, I hate to burst everyone's bubble but this type of design has been taught in many institutions around the world for a very long time. The field is called landscape architcture and if more designers would give this profession the credit and influence that it is due a world of ecologicaly informed minds would be setting examples instead of playing second fiddle to engineers and architects. But I digress, inform the masses and spread the good cheer round but let us mot simply sustain let us learn how work with, enhance, and revel in the abundance of nature.