Tuesday, October 15, 2013

In support of indigenous landscape architecture

In our current economic malaise, should lawns be illegal. They come at a terrible cost to productivity. Assuming $3/gallon in gas, 1 gallon gas/month/lawn, 1 hr/week/lawn, $24/hr average US wage, 1 lawn/3 Americans, 250 gallons water/lawn/week, our annual costs for 100,000,000 lawns are:
$124,800,000,000 in lost productivity
$3,600,000,000 in fuel cost
1,200,000,000 gallons of wasted fuel
1,300,000,000,000 gallons of water wasted
http://1.usa.gov/171tgx9

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

A.school: educating students architectural thinking

I'm quite fond of saying that Architecture is the design of structures in response to humanist requirements. Those structures are traditionally thought of as buildings, but they could be cities, businesses, societies, or any multitude of other things as well.

To fully apply this methodology, it's structure itself that must be defined. A structure is the arrangement of and relations between the parts or elements of something complex.

Architecture requires not just understanding the complexity of arrangements and relations, but using those relations to inspire and influence human emotion and behaviors. Therefore to be successful, an architect must be competent in engineering and legal systems, human psychology, project management, geometry, philosophy, and design/composition aesthetic principles.

A.school proposes that common architectural thinking principles are applied across any all fields. To be effective however, the systems that a given structure relies upon must be learned on a case by case basis in order develop maximize the possible solutions available within that system's given constraints.

With this understanding, architectural education can be applied to many fields outside of traditional building construction that rely on human interactions, such as business, technology, education, and politics to improve the societal interactions and outcomes of those fields.