Opening Your Eyes

No one, to the day of my graduation, had ever taught me to look understandingly at a painting, or a tree, or the facade of a building.

--George F. Kennan, Memoirs

Kennan is far from alone. Because of widespread visual illiteracy, most of man-made America is ugly, messy and inchoate. But something may soon be done about the root problem. Next week Senator Claiborne Pell's Education Subcommittee will hold hearings on a bill that would provide $10 million annually for environmental--including visual--education. During the hearings, the committee members (average age: 54) will be asked to pore over a book written expressly for 13-year-olds.

Our Man-Made Environment: Book Seven is, quite simply, the best primer on architecture and urban planning yet published in the U.S. Designed to open the eyes of seventh graders to the world being built around them, the book has much to teach adults as well.

Aspiration. It was conceived in 1966 after some educators in the Philadelphia school system asked the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects to help explain architecture to kids. But the collaborators set even higher goals. "We wanted to make students aware of their environment," says Architect Alan Levy. "We wanted to give them confidence in their ability to make judgments about what they like and don't like. Finally, we hoped to give them a sense of aspiration beyond the limits of the environment they know."

The job took 31 years and $60,000 in foundation grants. Last summer the educators and architects formed GEE! (the Group for Environmental Education) to work out, says GEE! Vice President William Chapman, a complete teaching program and to distribute the book. All 20,000 copies have since been sold (at cost) to schools in Philadelphia--plus Houston, San Mateo, Columbus, Ohio, and six cities in New Jersey. Despite its grade school language, the book is used by sophomores studying architecture at the University of North Dakota.

See and Do. Our Man-Made Environment bristles with challenge. Many of its pages are lightweight cardboard punch-outs, which can be folded to make beams, roofs, and whole buildings. One of the first lessons asks students to punch out six geometric shapes and arrange them in a pleasing design within a rectangular frame. When the students turn over the shapes, they find that the pieces represent armchairs, a table, a TV set. The next step is to rearrange the shapes within a room, which entails thinking about how people best communicate.

The lessons soon get more complex.

Students learn about weather, topography and motion as determinants of design. They are required to see and draw the "rhythmic" elements of a streetscape, like doors and windows. As if that were not demanding enough, the kids must also arrange identical punch-out "buildings" so that one--then two--units stand out among the rest. This done, they may never look blindly at a street again.

GEE! already has a series of similar workbooks in progress. "What we are trying to do is develop a program that gets students to recognize that the man-made environment is more than just dirty air and water pollution," explains Architect Richard Wurman. "In effect, we see the program as an invitation to a marvelous, continuous visual party." If GEE! succeeds, the day may come when kids will know why man-made America is ugly. Better still, they may know how to clean up the visual mess.

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