BUILDING FOR SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY - Kennedy Bibliothek

ecome literate. Vldeoliteracy, like drawing with a pencil, is very
natural to children.(1)
79. One reason why the perceptions of children tend to be richer and
freer than adults and why they are able to communicate complex interrelationships
of ideas in visual as well as literary form is that their
lives and worlds are much less rigid. Adults tend to lose these capabilities
because they are forced in our modern world to live within fixed
and unilateral frameworks of time, environment, laws, codes of dress and
behaviour, and so forth, which they have been taught to accept without
question. But courses have been conducted recently by The Open University
in Britain(2) in which people work at home, using their houses and
neighborhoods as experimental workshops for at first discovering colors,
textures, tastes, smells, and sounds, and then making constructs with
them in words and drawings and music; and the results show that before
long adults are able to be as rich and as free in communicating complex
ideas as children.
80. "When someone tries simply to make small structures, solely to exhibit
as fixed and finished products in a gallery or museum, the workshop
(studio) is a very limited kind of place. Now -that many people are becoming
more aware of their total environment they are working creatively
in a larger context, ranging from solving small problems (like making a
drawing or cooking a meal) to city-size or regional problems (like developing
an education/recreation system, or catalyzing social change, or
starting communication networks). In the larger type of problems, the
workshop extends out of one's apartment or house and into the community,
housing, estate, street, city, farm or fields. It is important to realize
that when one is involved in creating on such a large scale one's
frame of mind is that society is the workshop: one is living art, and
one's self is part of that process."(3)
Store-Front Design Centers
81. A less formal way of involving citizens and officials in planning
and design is simply to open up a design center in the community and allow
1) Simon Nicholson, Children as Planners, op.cit.
2) David Stea, Environmental Mapping, a course for adults and children in
mapping physical environments, mapping time/space (viz. a journey),
mapping perceptions, etc., prepared for Art and Environment, The Open
University, England, 1976.
3) David Stea, ibidem.
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