April 29, 2008 11:25 AM
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Education
Here's a trip down memory lane for all students of drafting, architecture, and landscape architecture, courtesy of
Architectural Record. This week they
review the new Architecture Handbook from the Chicago Architecture Foundation, which updates the foundations of the profession with new case studies and up-to-date terminology. The 489-page book is already very popular; according to the article, 71 high schools in 34 states, plus 10 community colleges, were using it.
One of the book's co-authors, Krisann Rehbein, says of the textbook's success “It’s been wonderful to see how architects pick up this book and say, ‘I wish I had this in high school.’"
Check out the whole article
here.
February 1, 2008 2:49 PM
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Education
This week a new website
ecolabeling.org launched, promising to cut through the clutter of the over 200 different types of
ecolabels floating around in many consumer industries. Whether it is LEED, Energy Star, or eco-harvested shellfish, ecolabeling.org will "include every single ecolabel out there, in any language." Each entry on the site contains details about the labeling organization, examples of their labels, and how to contact each group.
Sadly ecolabeling.org says it will not get into actually certifying that a particular group's label is truly green or sustainable. That, apparently, will be left up to all of us.
December 4, 2007 4:38 PM
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Education
If you are shopping for a science- and sustainability-minded teen (and happen to have a spare $129), The Dirt has found the perfect gift for you:
The Power House. This project kit explores uses of alternative energy and allows kids to "build a model house complete with solar panels, windmill, greenhouse, and desalination system. You can build and operate an electric train, windmill, solar cooker, solar hot water tank, hygrometer, electric motor, power hoist, sail car, and more!"
The kit also has experiments to teach kids about plants, evaporative cooling, and water management. And it comes with an electric car. How cool is that?
October 18, 2007 3:30 PM
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Education
News out of Madison today, where UW landscape architecture students have joined together to form a "green team" to make sustainability an affordable option for Wisconsin's American Indian tribes. From the article:
With a three-year grant from the Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Foundation, UW’s “Green Team” has developed a program to train local builders from reservation communities in green-building techniques, and implement those techniques by collaborating on “demonstration” houses. The goal of the program is to become locally sustainable as the builders from the tribes pass on the new skills through building green houses in their communities.
This year, the Green Team’s idea began to take shape. In May, builders from several Ojibwe communities traveled to Santa Fe, N.M., for a week of green building training, and ground was broken this fall for the first demonstration house, which is being built near Hertel, Wis., on the St. Croix reservation in northwestern Wisconsin.
Click through to read the whole piece
here.
August 2, 2007 12:19 PM
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Education
While
The Dirt mainly keeps out of the realm of Capitol Hill (leaving that to ASLA's fine
government affairs staff), here's something new from Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD): last month he introduced an amendment to the
No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), currently up for reauthorization. His amendment, called the "
No Child Left Inside" Act (H.R. 3036), would
- "Require states seeking new environmental education grants under No Child Left Behind to develop and submit a K-12 plan to ensure that high school graduates are environmentally literate. States receiving such funds would submit status reports on how those plans are being implemented.
- Provide new funding for states to develop, improve and advance environmental education standards.
- Provide new funding to train qualified teachers to teach environmental education courses and programs."
The Sabanes amendment has the support of the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, Audubon, and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, as well as the National Education Association. No matter what your opinion of NCLB may be, it seems like more environmental education in public schools would be a good thing, no?
[via treehugger.com]
June 20, 2007 11:19 AM
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Education
Check out this
neat learning science barge that is currently tooling around the island of Manhattan, growing food. The Science Barge was built by the New York Sun Works non-profit, and, according to their website, the barge
...is a sustainable urban farm powered by solar, wind, and biofuels, and irrigated by rainwater and purified river water. We grow food in the city with no carbon emissions, no water use, and no waste stream.
School kids from all five boroughs and the general public can visit and learn about solar power and urban gardens and farms.
Bill Thompson, FASLA, the editor
of Landscape Architecture magazine, asks the basic question "What do landscape architects read?" in next month's Land Matters column. You can get a sneak preview by visiting the latest
LAND Online here. "...[D]oes a professional aversion to reading (and its corollary, writing) have anything to do with the absence of a national, ongoing dialogue on significant landscape issues?" Thompson asks.
If you have an opinion on the subject, or want to list your favorite professional reading material, feel free to leave a comment here on The Dirt, or email Thompson at
bthompson@asla.org. Any comments will be considered for publication in
Landscape Architecture.
Under threat of demotion and possibly legal action, The Dirt has learned, bitterly, that we cannot demand that you list this blog as your most useful professional reading matter. Darn it.
The phenomenon of the proliferation in California of farmers' markets is explored in this column by the San Francisco Chronicle's Carol Lloyd.
Lower in the piece is a mention of Lucas Griffith, ASLA, a graduate student in landscape architecture at UC-Berkeley, who picked a farmers market as his master's thesis.
"What got me thinking is that farmers' markets increased tenfold between the late '70s and the late '90s, but there aren't more small farmers. If anything, there are less," he explained. He told me he had been coming to the market since he was a child, but as a landscape architect he saw the potential for improvement.
Griffith offers further insight in the article and plans later this month to release his findings at the market he studied.
The
Hartford Courant carries an interesting op-ed this morning from Patricia Wallace, a board member of
1,000 Friends of Connecticut, bemoaning
the lack of graduate schools for planning and design within the state's public and private institutions. Wallace notes that in the recently concluded gubernatorial campaign, sprawl, growth, and regional planning were all hot-button issues, but the state doesn't seem to have the knowledge base to tackle these issues. In her view, graduate school programs provide the right atmosphere for those training to be developers, architects, and planners to start working with community organizers to re-imagine old urban centers and their surrounding communities. She also notes that the Connecticut Chapter of the American Planning Association is working with the University of Connecticut to establish a planning program. It should be noted that UConn has an accredited undergraduate program in landscape architecture, but not a graduate program.
November 27, 2006 11:08 AM
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Education
Landscape architecture professors and urban planners from the University of Arkansas have presented proposals to the Italian hilltop village of Cervara di Roma to help revive its flagging economy and population.
The team hopes to revive the picturesque town with a mix of ecotourism, heritage trails, and sustainable development, according to a press release from the university. The village, founded more than 1,200 years ago by Benedictine monks, has fallen on hard times since World War II, and its population has dropped below 500 as younger residents move to nearby Rome.
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