Project Description
This student project was completed in School Without Classrooms: Micro-Weather Futures of Education Technology, a studio course at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation which won a Sloan Award in the 2016 ARCHITECT Studio Prize competition.
G.R.O.W is a new type of elementary school that disrupts the idea of grade-based learning by introducing urban farming as a collaborative, all-inclusive educational activity. G.R.O.W combines urban farming and education in order to promote learning that is associated with both seasonal and continuous growth. The school has a scalar relationship to climatic seasonality, expanding its learning areas during the growing season and compressing it in the winter months. The adjacency of planted spaces will blur the boundary between learning and agricultural areas. The same logic eliminates the boundary between classrooms and corridors to maximize students’ interaction and exposure to neighboring classes. The roof orientation and indoor growing location is attuned to the optimal growing conditions of the plants and students activities. They responds to different sunlight exposures and wind throughout the day.