BUILDING FOR SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY - Kennedy Bibliothek

84. The Design Center was opened so that the designers could understand
more clearly and intimately what these changes mean for education.
Jules Gregory wanted to design a school which would encourage children to
grow with confidence, and which would provide them with skills appropriate
to their talents and aspirations. He therefore wanted to design learning
environments which would he capable of responding to each individual's own
style and needs, interests and pace. And the only way of doing that was
to get to know his constituents intimately. Not only did he get to know
them intimately, they became his partners in design.
85. The Design Center opened in August 1970 with a public celebration.
The street was closed and the Mayor of East Orange cut the ribbon. An
architectural student from the University of North Carolina, Larry Goldblatt,
became the Design Center's director on a full-time basis throughout the
project's planning stages. The Design Center was officially open from
9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day, but many days included evening and night sessions
as well.
86. The objectives of the Design Center, as stated by Jules Gregory
that summer 1970 were:
- to draw people into the design process and make them equal partners;
- to overcome the lack of constructive focus and act as a catalyst
for community vitality;
- to help people understand each other through-involvement;
- to stimulate and cross-fertilize ideas;
- to identify community hopes and ideals, and measure them against
the realities of economic and technical constraints;
- to assure that the physical needs of the children and adults of
East Orange will be met.
87. To get the process going, the Uniplan team identified some thirty
community organizations, and two or three evenings of every week were dedicated
to meeting, with them in the Center, using drawings and slide presentations
and other techniques as a means of developing ideas and commitment.
The children from the East Orange schools were asked to express in
drawings what a school should be; and as ideas were developed and inventories
and drawings emerged, they were pinned up in the Design Center as
a perpetually changing and evolving workshop.
88. The Center's open door soon attracted the collaboration of the community,
particularly young people, whose inputs were creative and influential
in spite of the fact that none of them had any prior training in
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