Buildings for Kids as Educators
Buildings for Kids as Educators _ Paula Melâneo
Teaching is an ever-changing field, as the society is in constant development and mutation. Contemporary teaching methods tend to incorporate new communication and information technologies. These can include the internet, multimedia resources or new technological devices that demand new conditions from the classroom. Existing old buildings should adapt to the new activities, and the newly constructed ones, already planned for these new requirements, should be flexible to respond to the fast changes of technology’s uses we face in the modern days.
Also, life in the urban centers today is leading children and students to spend more time in school. This comes along with the need of providing new educational and non-educational spaces, and to rethink the role of the school, in the large scale, and of the classroom, in particular.
Urban How
After the Neighborhood’s Days
After the Neighborhood’s Days _ Aldo Vanini
Unlike the universe, which continues to expand, thinning and cooling, modern cities of the first world have long since slowed, if not stopped, their centrifugal process, having halted progressively the driving force of growth as of profound transformations of production dynamics.
As long as centrifugal expansion was in action, urban contexts lived through phases of resettlement of limited areas according to changing needs, the emergence of new functions, and the growth or fall of land value.
Nevertheless, the previous process of growth has left behind small discontinuities, anomalies in the urban entropy that, in rethinking the expansive model, now assume an important topological value; they no longer represent abandoned voids but rather genuine places, opportunities to create collective landmarks or individual statements of self. This is the starting point of a new relationship between the new intruder buildings and the consolidated urban fabric. If previously the main rule of urban construction was homologation and imitation, now, that collective effort and the original meaning of the neighborhood have been extinguished, a desire for individual distinction emerges, marking the anonymous matrix by an alien semantics, which thus makes it more significant.
