Built Environment's Contribution to Educational Ecosystem Services: Storytelling through Buildings for Sustainability Education

Aysegul Akturk (University of Missouri)

David Orr proposed an influential theory titled ‘Architecture as Pedagogy’ and argued that buildings and their surrounding landscape “reflect a hidden curriculum that powerfully influences the learning process” and convey a pedagogical value (1997, p.597). The topic of combining architecture and environmental education (EE) gained an increasing interest and now, represents a worthy growing body of literature. Recent studies use many different terms to describe buildings that aim to integrate EE such as ‘teaching tool’; ‘3-dimensional textbook’; and ‘teaching green building’ and measure the educational outcomes of these buildings to represent the potential of enhancing the knowledge, attitude, environmentally responsible behaviors. However, mostly the studies are about ‘green’ school buildings. Less is known about informal education and communication happening in sustainable buildings that affects users’ cognition about a sustainable life style. The sustainable buildings occupied by general public are unexplored. Most importantly, the knowledge of what specific architectural design elements, strategies, or features create such educational impact is still missing.

On the other hand, while there exists an acceleration in sustainable building practice, the broader public has very limited opportunity to learn about environment, sustainability, and how to engage with these new buildings and culture. Future studies are needed to explore users’ learning resulted from certain physical environment of sustainable buildings in order to leverage sustainable building technology. This study aims to address this gap with a goal of exploring both the designers’ intentions and users’ cognition about the communication happening in the sustainable buildings and to identify architectural features of sustainable buildings that creates opportunities to explain sustainability issues and concepts. Uniquely, this study offers to link educational ecosystem services concept tothe topic and asserts that if buildings represent human ecosystems, exploring educational aspects of buildings can help to understand sustainable buildings contribution to educational ecosystem services.