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Page 2 of 2 Schneider
says many students have told him that they thought he was crazy at
first. “But now they say, ‘I see that I’ve learned to do this work much
more mindfully and consciously.’ And that is something we sorely need,”
he says. “Whenever you intervene in the environment, you can’t just do
it on habit. You need to pay attention and see the consequences and
allow a design to emerge that responds mindfully to the site, the
people, and how they want to use it.” Kat
Vlahos grew up on a ranch in Colorado that was settled by her immigrant
Greek forebears. Her relationship to the land is deep. Like Schneider,
she is a professor at the University of Colorado, and teaches studio
courses in which students learn about “working landscapes”—places where
people have worked with the land over time to create something such as a
ranch, a place “where the buildings tend to be secondary to the land.”
She calls her course “Dwelling Place of the Western Spirit.” Vlahos
says that when she began this work in 1999 she taught a course called
“Building in the Land.” Since that time, she says, understanding of land
stewardship, resources, and sustainability has increased to the point
where these considerations are entering the mainstream of architecture
and architecture education. Still, most of her students have grown up in
urban or suburban environments, so they don’t have a strong connection
to the land and its rhythms. To them, she says, the environment is an
abstraction rather than “an ally and friend, one who supplies you with
life and livelihood, and whose ways must be understood and counsel
respected.” An
essential element in her class, Vlahos says, is taking her students on
field trips, overnight if possible. “We need to go to the land and
experience sun, wind, earth, and water,” she says. In Vlahos’ training,
if you are considering the quality of the sun—light, heat, reflection,
shadow, and so forth—you sit in the location where the building would be
sited and you quietly experience the quality of the sun at different
times of day. “What is the quality and the quantity of the sun as you
are viewing the south?” she asks. “How does that shift when you turn to
the east?” Vlahos often found that students’ designs were not sensitive
to the environment and what people’s experience of the structure would
be. “They would draw the same kind of window all the way round,” she
says, “but maybe the openings to the east should be quite different from
the openings to the west.” Vlahos
asks students to sit in sun and then to move to shade and pay attention
to what happens to their bodies. In that way, she says, they begin to
understand buildings as skins, systems that will have the same responses
as one’s skin. From a shoji screen to a massive concrete wall, building
materials are the skins that form the interface between outside and
inside. In
the same vein, she asks students to contemplate water, wind, and earth:
noticing how the water works on the land and trying to discover ways to
use it best, thinking of how structures will affect air movement,
experiencing the texture and colors of the land as a way to consider how
the buildings erected there can be in a harmonious relationship with
their surroundings. Within
the last five years, Vlahos says, students have begun to rethink how
they approach architecture. “The more they connect with the land,” she
says, “the less they want to disturb it—and architecture can be
violently disruptive.” Now, rather than trying to build something as a
monument to their talent, “more often than not they’re seeking ways to
rehabilitate or recycle buildings to meet new uses.” Vlahos
emphasizes that her projects are never theoretical: “They deal with
real people in real places. Architecture is a community act. It’s a
cultural act.” To be truly mindful in architecture and planning, she
says, you need to see all the forces coming together—“the land, the
environment all around, all the people affected. And then your work can
be sensitive and connected to the elements.”
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