If your professors won't teach sustainablilty, find someone who will.
You are a design student. It's your first day on campus. You are given a bag of granola and dropped off in the wilderness. This is how students at the Ecosa Institute--the only design program in the country devoted entirely to sustainability--spend the initial three days of their semester.
A nonprofit organization located in Prescott, Arizona, Ecosa began offering its immersion program in fall 2000. The wilderness trek is meant to establish the baseline for sustainability. It also distinguishes the school's way of teaching the subject from the growing number of courses scattered throughout mainstream schools today. "Sustainability is really the critical issue of our time," director Antony Brown says. "And while I think the profession is moving very quickly toward beginning to incorporate that in their actions, there's a real need for a whole systems approach that doesn't just look at energy efficiency, land use, or isolated issues."
The one-semester program at Ecosa offers more comprehensive green-building knowledge than a traditional four-year architecture program. Design students hungry for a holistic program add Ecosa to their education--even though it isn't accredited--because they simply can't learn this stuff anywhere else. "I didn't feel that I could study sustainability at the University of Oregon without a lot of extra effort and time on my part," architecture student Alissa McNair says. "The curriculum at Ecosa provided me with the broadest introduction to sustainability possible in sixteen weeks."
In Ecosa's classroom, work progresses quickly. Fifteen or so students of architecture, design, and planning--a mix of undergraduates, grad students, and some practicing professionals--start by designing residences for real clients from the community. Throughout the process experts are brought in to discuss issues such as solar design and materials. The group also takes field trips: they've studied regional building wisdom at Hopi and Navajo reservations, gone to green architect Will Bruder's studio, and visited Tucson to analyze New Urbanism, co-housing, and permaculture landscaping. By the end of the semester they work in teams on larger, more complex public projects; last term included a children's museum for the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and a multidisciplinary facility for Prescott College.
"To teach sustainability requires a completely different approach to design education. You can't teach whole systems thinking and integrated systems like you teach technical drawing skills," operations director Rob Israel says. "Other programs are still teaching a course for maybe an hour and a half, and then the students go on to their next class and do something completely different. It's kind of an add-on rather than the core curriculum."
www.ecosainstitute.org
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