Streaming Environments

STREAMING ENVIRONMENTS

Streaming proposes to develop a prototypical approach for bringing glasshouses (glasshouse is an historic term for what are now known as greenhouses) to public schools. National trends in education are currently seeking opportunities to merge classroom lessons with experiential learning. Simultaneously, public education is exploring ways to provide healthy food options and nutrition education to help combat recent surges in childhood obesity. These factors have fostered an abundance of new schoolyard gardens that cultivate children’s imaginations and education simultaneously. While the vast majority of these gardens are currently being constructed as outdoor, autonomous raised beds, we propose that glasshouses could both extend the seasonal capacity of such programs (especially in cold climate states) as well as provide a novel way to approach the upgrading of existing school building’s environmental performance and overall learning environments.

Linking schools with glasshouses would enable garden programs to physically integrate with the daily experience of children. Furthermore, the glasshouse can be developed to work simultaneously as an autonomous growing space as well as a double skin facade therein opening vast possibilities to transform the spatial, environmental and performance capacities of older, underperforming buildings.