Hello!

A little about me – my name is Katy and I am a human geography student from Bristol. Before coming to university I was very conflicted over what degree I should take, I always had a love for art and design but my love for geography won over and I am now in the final year of my degree. I have taken courses at the ECA such as Visual Culture and Drawn from the City, both of which I enjoyed enormously, but I was determined to take a course this year that combined both my interests in design and the environment. My degree has enabled me to study a range of interesting topics such as rights to public spaces, more-than-human relationships, waste, capitalism, the Anthropocene, the geography of senses and many more! I am hoping this course will help me in understanding how designers think, create, and innovate with a socially and environmentally responsible ethos. I am also exploring options to do further study in sustainable urban design at masters level so this course will hopefully enrich my understanding.

In our first introductory seminar we were asked to provide an example of design that displayed obvious environmental consciousness. I selected Andrès Jaque’s ‘Colegio Reggio’, School of Cork in Madrid. There are many elements of this design that impressed me, however after reading an interview with Jaque, it was the purpose and ethos behind the design that appealed to me the most. The design of the school goes beyond just simply using sustainable elements, but adopts an overall ecologically conscious approach, placing significant emphasis on the global environmental consequences of design. This includes the materials used, its coexistence with nature and its impressive coproduction with school students. The architecture and detailed design actively facilitates creative learning. For me the most striking feature is the thick layer of yellow cork covering 80% of the exterior of the building. This acts as a natural insulator whilst also serving to provide a habitat and ecosystem for fungi, plants and animals. Jaque’s overall ethos is to intervene with nature by constructing design that evolves with it, designing with the principle of coexistence rather than divorcing ourselves further from our natural world.