Diary of an astronaut
Oct 13, 02:20 PM
Fragment of Ilan Ramon’s diary
This short article in the Guardian newspaper Saturday October 4, 2008 p.26, stuck with me. The loss of the space shuttle Columbia was an event that many of us will remember and have seen mediated by television, however, the painstaking recovery and reconstruction of Ilan Ramon’s journal and his words seemed remarkable. Not only had the words survived the catastrophe but their two-month long exposure to the wind, sun and rain, as they lay waiting to be found. The pages were tattered and torn, some were pierced with tiny holes, some were tightly stuck to others, while some pieces were compacted into wads as small as a fingernail. The 37 pages were found just over two months after the shuttle explosion, wet and crumpled, in a field just outside the U.S. town of Palestine, Texas. That Ramon was an Israeli, and his words were found in a small town called Palestine, seems the strangest of coincidences; that these fragile pages survived at all, seems to defy rational thought.
Rural Studio
Oct 13, 02:12 PM
Based in the School of Architecture at Auburn University Alabama, Rural Studio forms part of a commitment to bridge learning in academia with ‘real’ world needs and problems. Along with the Urban studio programme, students create/design/build for local community contexts, putting education and learning to work creatively in meeting the needs of people and place. The mission of The Rural Studio is to allow students to find solutions to the needs of the community within the community’s own context, not from outside it. Abstract ideas based upon knowledge and study are transformed into workable solutions forged by real human contact, personal realization, and a gained appreciation for the culture.
The Rural Studio consists of three programs across the period of study – all taking students out of the institution to “form teams, to plan, design and build community projects”. Key to Rural Studio, is the making of ideas into habitable, affordable buildings. The 20K house is a unique project at the Rural Studio. The design for the house is not client or site specific, but rather intended as a prototype for low-income housing in Hale County. At present there does not exist a precedent for a house that can be built for $10,000 materials and $10,000 labor and profit. The 20K house aims to create that precedent [...] giving people an alternative to substandard housing or trailers.
Students at Rural studio offer up blogs of their projects as the process progresses, offering fantastic visual and personal insights to the making and realisation of ideas. Reminiscent of the communality of barn raising, each project opens up the richness of dialogue and relations that are built up between students and those who will live in and use the architecture.
Do schools kill creativity?
Dec 9, 05:33 PM
In this short presentation for the annual TED conference, Ken Robinson, makes the case for “creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it”. Ken Robinson led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy. His book Out of our minds explores the different ways in which creativity is undervalued and ignored in Western culture and particularly in our educational systems.
For more interviews and information on the work of Ken Robinson, check out the following sites:
IMNO
Ken Robinson