Pedagogy & Space: A Rural Revolution
Daniel Garcia
MIT School of Architecture & Planning
From the Jury:
This project combines the necessity for educational infrastructure with often overlooked agricultural infrastructure. There’s a lot of reconversion projects of these kinds of elements, but when grain silos are incorporated into cities, all of a sudden they become retrofitted. It is nice to see the relation to existing agricultural landscape. There is a very strong connection between what’s happening on the inside — the educational program — and the container. Both are very strong.
Pedagogy & Space speculates on the agency that architecture possesses to become a pedagogical tool and its ability to transform as pedagogy continues to evolve. For this project, a rural context, the town of Sebastian becomes the platform for a new typology of schools that allows small communities to construct and reconstruct their learning environments. As storage and production of grain has moved to larger, regional facilities, such rural, railroad-side towns abound with obsolete grain silos and warehouses. These structures are centrally located and adjacent to residential areas, suggesting an opportunity to adapt the rural archetypes into a new kind of school.
The shift from grain production to “brain production” requires a new form of architectural practice, one that can engage with rural towns to reimagine how to design for new and existing educational facilities by taking more stock in design decisions and the implications those have for planned and unplanned learning. Heuristic architecture moves past the notion of “classrooms in a school” to the idea of the school as a classroom.