Luminous-ground

Sustainable Places to Learn

From the salt pans of India to the woods north of Chicago, from Uganda to Colombia teams of architects are partnering with the very children who could be a part of  site specific learning. An open source competition resulted in a short list of 52 projects narrowed down to eight finalists at the Aspen Ideas Festival.  Judging was based on feasibility, sustainability, innovation in learning and overall design quality of these projects submitted from 65 countries.

       This bamboo wood school was designed by a team from the Czech Republic for children in Nepal.

 

        And this "blurred classroom" was designed for students in New York City by a NYC team of architects.

Architecture for Humanity began seriously studying the after effects of Hurricane Katrina on schools in the Gulf region and realized there are about six million students crammed into unhealthy trailer-boxes trying to learn. It is a microcosm of the larger macro problem.  Classrooms in the U.S. and around the world are in dire need of upgrading and rehabbing. Few can argue with the need for safe, sustainable, smart classrooms worldwide. In fact estimates of illiterate people around the world now stands at 776 million. Read more.

Architectural Science Grounded in Ancient India: Vastu Shastra

How do you make sure your home, your office, and even your town offers the best energy for living? Some people study and implement “Feng Shui” to help figure it out. But there’s an even older tradition—500 years older in fact. It's based on earlier oral traditions later written in the Rig Veda and has for 5,000 years made the answer clear: Vastu.

Vastu is a Sanskrit word packed with meaning: house of dwelling that renders happiness, prosperity and protection in life and even after death.  It is the perfect perception of geography, direction, topography, physics, the environment, and cosmology itself. Vustu means the unmanifest;  Vastu: the manifest. By combining ayurvedic science and astrology, Vastu Shastra makes visible deeply held beliefs as it connects humans to nature’s energies.

       The Vastu College of Archtecture