"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought." - Albert Szent -Gyorgyi
This led to many discussions of issues affecting Calgary communities which further led us to three main topic areas: environment, structures, and citizens. Our experience at Open Minds 2School, provided rich opportunities to explore 'Inn from the Cold', the Dr. Carl Safran building, Nexen gardens and Memorial Park. These experiences set the stage for meaningful debates in which students could share their ideas with each other.
Some issues that arose were:
- When an old building is torn down do we preserve it or do we change the space to better fit the needs of our community
- Should more homes be built on our wetland?
- What can we do for the homeless
Back at school, students worked with our artist in residence, Tracy Franks to design and construct architectural models of greenhouses connected to our explorations of building things, needs of plants, our community, and shapes and space. The models helped us design a full scale greenhouse for our school. The greenhouse will be used to grow plants which will be used to give back to the community.
Next we plan to create a full architectural model of the communities of Connaught and Royal Oak in order to fully understand the tensions that exist between the environment, structures and the citizens that make up our communities.