Description of Proposal: Presentation
At the 2002 Retreat I presented a position paper titled ÒProspects for Ecological Design EducationÓ (a copy is posted in the retreat archive on the Web site). One of the problems I discussed was the inability of many students to perceive a site, especially a ÒnaturalÓ site, as a human construct and to conceptualize its potential to be reconstructed and interpreted through architecture. I discussed two strategies that might be explored to provide students with a more effective methodology for exploring and representing their perceptions of the physical, experiential qualities of a site.
One of these was to introduce students to various ways of perceiving and representing environments such as those employed by environmental psychologists and naturalists. I used the work of artist, writer, naturalist Hannah Hinchman as one example. Last fall I was fortunate to be able to bring her to LSU for a week at the beginning of our Fall Semester to work with some of our fourth and fifth year students, and I would like to present and assess these experiments.
At the 2002 Retreat I also speculated that other schools might already employ one or more of the approaches I had suggested, and subsequent discussions proved to be quite lively. If this proposal is accepted, I propose to solicit examples from other schools via the Listserv (both from individuals planning to attend the retreat and others) and either invite them to make a presentation or send me examples that I could then include in my own presentation. My intention would be to have approximately half of the session devoted to presentations and the other half to an open discussion. My hope is that such a session might provide participants with insights into methodologies that might prove worthy of further investigation in their own teaching.
Audiovisual needs:
I expect that the presentations would be in PowerPoint format, so a digital projector would be required. I would provide copies of an outline of the presentations with appropriate bibliographic and other resource information.
Contact info:
Christopher C. Theis, AIA
Professor and Graduate Program Coordinator
School of Architecture
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
225/578-4257
decod6@lsu.edu