That same district, however, replicated one school five times without performing a post-occupancy evaluation on the first prototype to see whether it needed work. I have spent over twenty years researching and designing indoor and outdoor learning environments as functional art forms, places of beauty, and motivational centers for learning. We have used the architecture of the school classroom, museum exhibits, and the landscape as a means of demonstrating how the built and natural environments demonstrate, in real live form, the ideas, laws and principles that we at present are trying to teach children from textbooks. For instance, a solar greenhouse can help children nourish life outside themselves, understand botany, and begin to learn about alternative energy systems. Its systems can be studied and compared to body systems.
Children can graph and understand plant growth, classify and compare it, and harvest food.
A cooking environment can provide science and math learning, cultural uses of food, and the creativity of edible art. The electrical mechanical system, if left open for children to see, can be a lesson in the input and output systems that are similar to the arteries and veins in our bodies. The acreage surrounding a school, oftentimes a valuable but neglected piece of flat property, can be redesigned with the help of a landscape architect. Hills, valleys, deciduous trees, non-deciduous trees, gardens, and graphics, all become learning tools. In designing buildings, it is essential to study the client, his special needs, spaces needed to support activities, and aesthetic preferences.