| Through many of today's built environments, children are learning that they are safe from the outside world; no matter day or night, the built environment makes them safe from pouring rain and gusty wind; it makes them safe from wild animals from sneaky squirrels to grizzly bears. With good intentions the architecture of the industrial era was more about having control over nature than it was about living in harmony with nature. Consequently instead of learning to enjoy the breezes that come from natural ventilation, children learned that air conditioning was what made their environment pleasant. Children who live in increasingly dense cities may be further distanced from nature, especially children who live in impoverished communities with inadequate parks and open spaces and concerns about safety; in addition, a plethora of electronic devices for education and entertainment are a major pulling factor for children to stay indoors. Many children may be stuck indoors using these effortless (physically) devices without opportunities for outdoor play. Or they may simply not care to play in wooded landscapes, on the beach, or on snow-covered mountains, which all served as precious learning environments for earlier generations. As nature is ever more threatened by people-designed built environments, children have no way of learning how to develop a less destructive relationship with their surroundings.;Learning how to live well with one's surroundings is called "ecological literacy" (Orr, 1992, p.86) and clearly today's children are more likely to be deficient in ecological literacy than were the boys and girls of a bygone era. Yet a number of architects and educators have been developing ways to foster more ecologically literate citizens. This thesis will carry forward those efforts and search for a solution to (a) help children gain, through architecture, a better sense of how people and nature interact and, through that sense, to (b) possibly help them learn to take action as environmental advocates at a personal and community level. The ultimate intent of the thesis is developing a methodology for achieving these two goals.;Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan (2007) believed that "if the built environment is a powerful silent teacher, we can change the message people get from it. It can be redesigned so that people are richly informed about their place and the ecological processes endemic to it" (p. 186). Hoping to inform children about their place and its ecological processes, the thesis will seek to answer: How can architecture help children gain a better sense of their relationship with nature? How can children use their understanding of nature to develop an ability to take action as environmental advocates?;To explore these questions, the thesis will begin with researching existing literature about the ways that children relate to nature and the positive interactions they can have through the natural environment as mediated by architecture. Then it will continue the investigation through precedent studies to see what is working successfully to help children become more environmentally aware citizens.;Finally, the thesis will synthesize the lessons learned from the literature and the precedent studies to suggest strategies for creating educational activities and ecologically designed spaces that can help children develop as environmentally aware citizens. The goal is to create a new approach to using architecture to help children become "richly informed about their place and the ecological processes endemic to it" (Van der Ryn & Cowan, 2007, p. 187). |
