Metropolis - January Sample 2008

FRIENDSHIP CIRCLE

natural is this interior that there are rooms where you do a double-take, trying to distinguish the room you’re in from the outdoors viewed through the window. In some places patterns on a wall made from recycled wood chips and chunks match the riotous random pattern of the ferns, salal, tree trunks, and forest-floor detritus visible outside. A given piece of furniture—crafted out of a log or featuring spindles made from unfinished tree branches—looks more or less like the tree parts outside, just a few feet away.

“Is that real? It’s plastic, right?”

“We really tried to make the learning something kids experience,” O’Rourke says. “We try to model for the kids. It’s great fun when they are surprised by something.”

“How come all the windows are on one side?”

“Someone asked Dr. Seuss one time, ‘Why do you write about things that are out of whack?’” says Clancy Wolf, Island Wood’s technology coordinator. “And that’s one of the really neat things about these buildings: they’re in a sense out of whack. So when something doesn’t sit right with the way kids are used to, they’re going to check their assumptions.”

“How come the roof’s upside down?”

“Like when kids get outside and look back here,” Wolf continues, “they see this butterfly roof instead of a normal one with the peak in the middle. One side of the roof is designed to have solar gain, and we want high windows facing south so we can get passive solar heat, and the roof butterflies there so we can capture the water right down the middle, pour it into that cistern. Kids see that kind of stuff and ask about it.”

The Friendship Circle provides a sheltered outdoor gathering space for educational programs and campfires. The red-cedar logs were selectively harvested locally.

Island Wood’s architecture, then, is didactic. Mithun project lead David Goldberg calls the structures “a textbook.” The buildings are a meta-environment: they’re not only sustainable, they’re about being sustainable. There doesn’t seem to be any element to the architecture that isn’t making a statement about itself.

Island Wood’s Welcome Center—a large, spacious room—features a 97-foot beam, hewn from old-growth timber 150 years ago by the old mill, suspended from the ceiling in tandem with a replica

The buildings are a meta- of one of the mill’s massive saw blades. The eye-catching display environment: they’re not only ^is ^designed ^to ^deliver ^a ^history ^lesson. ^You ^watch ^shoeless ^fourth-graders sliding giddily across the concrete floor in their socks under sustainable, they’re about be- this arrangement and you’re reminded of children’s stories for adults: _ing _sustainable. _There _doesn’t the genre that appeals to kids while offering a deeper message accessible only to their elders. continued on page 126 seem to be any element to the architecture that isn’t making a statement about itself.

Summer sun

The Floating Classroom was suggested by a child at a charrette. An underwater pulley system operated by onboard hand cranks carries small groups across Mac’s Pond to take samples for a watershed-quality course.

LEARNING STUDIO

Photovoltaics: 25-cm array

Passive
solar heating

The south side of the Learning
Studio’s butterfly roof is precisely
angled to capture the winter-
solstice sun. PV cells cover the
longer northern side, and in
the center, water for irrigation
is captured in a cistern.