THE
PUBLIC
SCHOOL
NEW YORK

Tilling Education: An Eco Aesthetic Approach "To talk to me about sustainability is like talking to me about giving birth," "Am I against giving birth? No. But would I like to spend my time doing it? Not really. I'd rather go to a baseball game." - Peter Eisenman, "The Case for a Green Aesthetic", Metropolis, Oct. 2001. 1) Agenda for Greener and Grander After implementing environmental standards, why does green architecture look so bland? Passive cooling, low flush toilets, and harvested lumber do not foreground evocative design. During the last two decades, the prevalent challenge for the sustainable design movement in the United States has been to sluggishly modify the behavior of the developers, architects, and planners responsible for the sizable majority of new projects. What does it take to re-create the "Bilbao effect" (artifact as stimulating catharsis) ecologically? The profession has to restructure its pedagogical goals in terms of environmental studies. By educating professionals on the sensibilities of green design, the ultimate goal of this course was to make ecology visible. 2) Draw the Wind Students were asked to choose an ecological system/theme in context and describe it, drawing or mapping in the factors that were especially "unseen," such as mapping flows of gray water runoff in a parking lot, a flower opening for solar income, infrastructure in the future, sounds of highway traffic effecting bird habitat, fast cars and slow clouds, landfills yet to be made, energy nets,...etc. 3) Exquisite Corpse Like any ecological system, nothing is pure. After each individual student accomplishes his/her task they were asked to switch with a partner. Students were asked to assist each other in learning individual choices of media. All of the projects were combined and recombined until the unexpected was achieved. The prevailing goal for the final class product was a visual representation of ecology as an "exquisite corpse" of many competing systems. A collage of tiling environments onto environments.