Our team partnered with the Baltimore Curriculum Project,
a nonprofit charter school foundation that operates five schools in Baltimore
City. Our initial meetings were with Alison Perkins-Cohen, the Executive Vice
President of BCP, and Rhonda Richetta, the Principal of the City
Springs School. We learned that BCP uses a very closely tracked
curriculum in their schools that?s based on direct instructional interaction
between teacher and student, and that their lesson plans are synchronized and
coordinated across their schools. This allows students, faculty, parents, and
administrators to form a community of learners, with a growing common knowledge
base and a shared vision for education. Education at BCP schools is
research based, and relies heavily on the continuous collection and evaluation
of data from the classroom. The students themselves are beginning to use this
data to set their own regular goals for achievement, and are able to motivate
themselves by watching their own progress. These methods have enabled BCP to
continually meet or exceed goals set by the Baltimore City School system, more
than tripling rates of State Reading Test Proficiency.

In a workshop with students at the City Springs School, we
introduced them to a few of the different drawing methods that architects use,
and discussed the issues of space, geometry, light, and materials that
architects are concerned with. We worked with the students as they made
drawings of their classroom space, many of them were especially interested in
representing the lists of daily goals posted in the classroom, the storage
space and shelves, the board, and the windows.

We were interested in integrating BCP?s emphasis on
research, data, and interaction into our own goals for an architecture that can
have a measurably positive effect on the people who use it everyday. Defining
learning as the potential for making connections to the larger world, we
found an opportunity for an architectural intervention at the classroom?s
aging, outdated and inefficient window system: the literal interface between
the space of education and the larger environment. We created a diagram
illustrating the various functions of the existing window wall as a series of
filters for light, air, sound, views, and information.

Our proposal is for a system of
multi-functioning, off-the-shelf components that, when combined, reorganize the
window wall into a screen that acts like a machine for interacting with the
outside world. Through teleconferencing, data overlays, and side-by-side
comparisons between the skyline of Baltimore and other cities around the globe,
the students of City Springs are able to link their own learning experience to
students in other countries. This kind of data display and feedback also
enables the students to track their own goals as a class, and as individuals.
Additionally, the Window Wall also allows the students to regulate their own immediate
physical environment, fine tuning the light, air, and acoustics of their space
in order make the most of their connection to these other, larger systems.