Architecture For Humanity – Auckland Chapter

The Auckland Chapter submitted a 1000 word venture summary for the annual University of Auckland Business School “SPARK” Ideas Challenge competition under the social entrepreneurship category. We were one of 10 winners in this category and were awarded $1000 for our idea.  Here are some of the photos from the prizegiving ceremony.

IDEA:

UNESCO has marked 2005-2014 as the decade of Education for Sustainable Develop-ment[1], so we are proposing that we build Sustainable Classroom Design for New Zealand’s Children.

We want to raise the awareness of humanitarian design and advocate for better classroom design in New Zealand Schools. Information and Computer based Techno-logies (ICT) will soon take over the traditional mode of learning in New Zealand yet the vast majority of New Zealand schools are neither equipped nor prepared to take on this challenge.

The Ministry of Education has broadly identified the three essential learning environments required in every school as follows: i) cave space, for individualised reflective learning; ii) campfire space, the most traditional mechanism of learning via storytelling; iii) watering hole space, a place to quench one’s thirst and more importantly to learn from peers in an informal exchange of dialogue. These three, archetypal areas, while important, are not enough, according to Dr. David Thornburg[2]. There is one more that must be considered: life, an opportunity to apply the knowledge from these spaces. Design education for children enables us to foster visionary architects and engineers of the future.

We want to help schools achieve their successful transition into 21^st century mode of learning by developing a sustainable design curriculum especially tailored to the learning needs of Kiwi kids and the existing needs of New Zealand school environments. We firmly believe that where resources and expertise are scarce, innovative, sustainable and collaborative design can really make a difference in people’s lives. In order to optimise the learning experience for our children it is most appropriate to design the environment that reflects the needs of children. While majority of these decisions get made by administrators, in reality it is the users – i.e. the children themselves – who should have a voice in what gets built around them. This idea is ultimately geared towards meeting the optimum, rather than the minimum standards of New Zealand Building Code for all New Zealand Schools. We believe that sustainable education begins by creating sustainable environments for learning.

The Statistics New Zealand[3] estimates the number of school aged children to be about 1.1m, or just under 25% of the population. There are about 2,750 schools across New Zealand and these are our primary beneficiaries/clients.

There is already a great demand for the our services, wherein the current demand outstrips the supply (our resources). Earlier this year we sent out a call to all primary and secondary schools to offer an opportunity to participate in an international design competition through Open Architecture Network[4] on redesigning classrooms as our project partners, and we were overwhelmed with amount of interest we received in response. Even though we could only choose one school, we have clearly identified a need within New Zealand which would go beyond a one-off design competition.

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[1] Bjorneloo, Inger (Ed.), UNESCO: Education for Sustainable Development in Action, Technical Paper No 4 – 2007

[2] Thornburg, David, Campfires in Cyberspace: Primordial Metaphors for Learning in the 21^st Century, Thornburg Centre for Professional Development, pp1-12

[3] http://www.stats.govt.nz/infoshare

[4] The Open Architecture Network is an online, open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design. http://www.openarchitecturenetwork.org