Notes
The Seventy-Year Legacy of Environment Behavior Studies at the University of Kansas: The Importance of Place and Place Making in the Midwest
Kent Spreckelmeyer, Hui Cai, and Kapila Silva
The University of Kansas, School of Architecture & Design
Abstract
This presentation outlines the seventy-year development of environment behavior research and environmental design initiatives at the University of Kansas (KU). This development is the result of the independent but intersecting foundations of ecological psychology, culturally responsive design processes, and environmental sustainability. The thread that ties these streams of thought together is the importance that place and place making have played in a middle-American context during a time of significant demographic, economic, and social change. Although the primary emphases of the paper will be retrospective and historical, we also feel it will demonstrate how a philosophy of integrating research and design processes can create a continuous and sustainable model of environmental education.
In 1947 the Midwest Psychological Research Station was established in the small Kansas town of Oskaloosa. The original purpose of the Station was to study children’s behavior in the rural setting. With the rapid expansion of rural school consolidation and the elimination of smaller schools in the 1950s, research questions shifted to the psychological effects of environments on social processes. The Station was active between the late 1940s and 1973 and involved Roger Barker and his KU colleagues Herbert Wright, Phil Schoggen, and Paul Gump and numerous graduate students, including Robert Bechtel. In 1965 Bechtel was a founder of the Environmental Research and Development Foundation to coordinate environmental design research projects for a range of public and private clients. Beginning in the 1930s, George Beal, the chair of the architecture program, began to incorporate Frank Lloyd Wright’s concept of Usonian house types and energy conservation techniques in the architectural curriculum. In the early 1970s the faculty of the newly formed School of Architecture and Urban Design began a series of research and design initiatives focused on social and cultural processes, hosted EDRA 6 in Lawrence and EDRA 40 in Kansas City, and organized the Built Form and Culture conferences in 1984 and 1986. Victor Papanek was a key contributor from 1981 to 1997 in establishing a series of research initiatives in cross-cultural analysis, sustainable environments, and design ethics. The Digital Image Archive on Vernacular Design, a repository of photographs on vernacular design across the world donated to the School by Amos Rapoport, is a recent addition to the KU archive. Current environment behavior design and research initiatives are evidence-based design research of healthcare facilities, healthy community design initiatives, design/build processes, and historical and cultural place analyses.
The history of environment behavior research at the University of Kansas documents not only the earliest theories and methods of the field, but is also a case study in the ways environmental design processes have evolved over the life of the discipline. Environment behavior research emerged at KU as a result of its attachment to the Midwest and evolved into an empathy for global communities, its dedication to an approach that has remained pragmatic and practice-based, and its assumption that environmental research and the act of designing are reinforcing and mutually dependent processes.
Introduction
The years following the Second World War saw changes that affected American society in profound ways. It was a time that challenged established norms and produced significant shifts in the ways people viewed their place in the natural, built, and social worlds. In rural America, changes in the means of production and increasingly expanded forms of industrialized agriculture meant that educational, healthcare, and residential environments were shifting from isolated and small-scale places to specialized and densely populated spaces. Farms became larger and more mechanized, causing a rapid depopulation of rural settlements. Historically, rural children were educated in the primary years in one-room schoolhouses, only “going to town” to attend high school in their teens. Similarly, after the passage of the Hill-Burton Act in 1946, healthcare in rural communities began moving from house calls by individual physicians to community hospitals and clinics. The isolated farm house was being replaced by the suburban “ranch house” as the depopulation of rural areas continued. Designers were now being asked to plan and construct new building types, such as consolidated schools, community healthcare systems, federally funded roadways, and expanding regional cities and exurban conurbations. These all challenged the concepts of local control, community cohesion, and the social norms that had existed in the traditional rural context.
It is not surprising that fundamental questions arose at this time in the design and engineering professions, education, and the social sciences that attempted to quantify, rationalize, and predict the ways that new forms of built space could accommodate these new changes in rural settings. This paper is an attempt to explain how and why the study and use of Environment Behavior (EB) research was a natural outgrowth in the late-1940s at the University of Kansas (KU). The thesis of the paper is that the evolution of Environment Behavior studies was and continues to be the direct result of cultural, climatic, geographic, and economic influences that define, in fundamental ways, the place we call “the Midwest.” Midwest happens to be in this instance eastern Kansas, but could have otherwise been situated in any rural, agricultural, low-density environment. In order to simplify – in reality over-simply – our narrative we have chosen two individuals to mark the origins of this evolution at KU: Roger Barker and George Beal. Barker was the founding director in 1947 of the Midwest Psychological Field Station in the small Kansas town of Oskaloosa. Beal was the Chair of Architecture in the School of Engineering between 1945 and 1962 and built his career before that developing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian building concepts and inventing one of the first heliodons, an instrument to measure the effects of solar access on buildings. From these two independent academic strands and the processes that followed in their collective wake we want to present an intellectual “family tree” of who, what, why, and when the pattern of Environment Behavior studies emerged at KU, and how it has been sustained by a direct and intimate connection to a sense of place and the process of place making. The narrative is not a detailed analysis of theories and methods of Environment Behavior research and design. It is an explanation – primarily from an architectural perspective – of the individuals that used the associations of colleagues who were instrumental in EDRA’s development to advance the view of design as a human-centered and socially driven process.
The Foundations of Ecological Psychology at KU
Roger Barker arrived at the psychology department of the University of Kansas in 1947 after working with Kurt Lewin and developing techniques of observing children’s behavior at the University of Iowa. Barker and his colleague Herbert Wright established the Midwest Psychological Field Station in Oskaloosa to continue studying children’s behavior in a small Kansas town of less than 1,000 residents. They resided in the town and created a field office on the primary commercial street of Oskaloosa. By the early 1950s the focus of the work shifted to investigate the connections between the behavior of children and their families and the physical environments of the town and its outlying farming communities. They began to categorize a wide number of what they called “behavior settings” to measure the effects of human interactions and use patterns throughout the day, seasonal changes, and the progress of the population over the course of five years. The longitudinal study of 119 children and their families resulted in Midwest and Its Children (Barker and Wright, 1954) and created the theoretical framework for codifying the behavioral basis of how humans act within and react to their physical surroundings.
By the late 1950s, the effects of rural depopulation and the consequent move to consolidate small schools throughout the Midwest became a primary focus of the Field Station. “The post-war suburban boom, Sputnik in 1957, and the diminishing number of children in rural schools fueled a wide discussion about how to reform education, especially high school education, as farms expanded, rural schools closed and better roads made consolidation possible and necessary. But how much consolidation? What school size?” (Jonathan Barker, 2016). Barker and his colleague Paul Gump began an extensive study of the effects of school size on student behavior and social patterns. Based on their previous work they suspected that small schools typical of American rural life since the mid-nineteenth century had positive social and educational outcomes in comparison to the post-Second-World-War push to consolidate schools in ever-increasingly larger centralized systems and facilities. This flew in the face of the accepted national norms that recommended graduating classes contain at least 100 students. (Bard et al, 2006) The result of their research, Big School, Small School: High School Size and Student Behavior (1964), confirmed their hypothesis. “I know from my conversations with him that Roger believed that the case for favoring smaller schools was solid and that ways could and should be sought to create small schools or schools with small-school qualities in larger towns and cities” (Jonathan Barker, 2016) These findings have profound consequences for educational debates that continue today.
Between the completion of Midwest and Big School Barker and his family spent time in a small Yorkshire village to test the idea of using behavior setting techniques in a separate cultural context. Over the course of several years collecting and comparing data sets between the American and English towns, Barker and his graduate student, Phil Schoggen (KU PhD, 1957) established the fundamental bases for ecological psychology and the methods that created a distinct track within the larger field of environmental psychology. Their 1973 book, Qualities of Community Life: Methods of Measuring Environments and Behavior Applied to an American and an English Town, was a culmination for Barker and his colleagues of ways social scientists can embed themselves in a place to both understand and fashion behavioral responses and attitudes. Barker and Schoggen describe this process as one that emphasized the dynamic and constantly changing nature of place as a way to understand human behavior. The critical reaction to the book was a watershed within the discipline and established in fairly stark terms the separation of the distinct fields of ecological and environmental psychology.
Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s a range of researchers and graduate students contributed to not only Barker and Wright’s work, but also the larger research programs in psychology at KU. One of the important forces that drove many of these efforts was the clinical and experimental work being done by the Menninger Clinic and Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. Founded in 1919 by Dr. Charles Menninger and brought to national attention in the 1940s by his sons Karl and William, this organization influenced many of the psychological and behavioral health initiatives at KU. The Menninger’s created the Environmental Research Foundation (later incorporated as the Environmental Research and Development Foundation in 1965) as “an interdisciplinary group to solve problems of designing for human needs” (ERDF). In addition to Phil Schoggen, three other individuals received their PhDs from KU who would subsequently play central roles in the Environment Behavior fields in general and EDRA in particular. Robert Sommer received his doctorate in 1956 and taught at UC Davis between 1963 and 2003. His 1969 book, Personal Space, established the framework for defining the importance of human use and function as the fundamental metrics for determining the success of buildings. His work has influenced designers and environmental researchers from the inception of EB studies. Allan Wicker (KU PhD, 1967) taught at Claremont Graduate University between 1971 and 1999 and authored the 1979 book An Introduction to Ecological Psychology in which he placed the full body of work at the Midwest Station in a unified theory of behavior settings, human characteristics, and temporal qualities of the built environment. Probably the most significant connection between the foundational work of Barker and his KU colleagues and EDRA was Bob Bechtel (KU PhD, 1967). Bob was instrumental in continuing the consulting and design research of ERDF as well as his long-term editorial leadership of Environment and Behavior. He taught at the University of Arizona between 1976 and 2010 and was the co-author of numerous anthologies, conference proceedings, and methodological collections that acted as seminal touchstones for the various strands and schools of Environment Behavior research and design. The Midwest Field Station closed in 1972 after a twenty-five year period that marked the early foundations of Environment Behavior studies.
Environmental Ecology, Pragmatism and Prairie Sensibilities in Architecture at KU
At the same time ecological psychology was taking root in the 1940s, parallel developments in architectural education had been under way at KU to transform the dominant model of Beaux Arts form-giving to one based on more localized and pragmatic principles. George Beal graduated from the KU architecture program in the School of Engineering in 1923 and was appointed to the faculty in 1926. In 1934, he and his wife, Helen, were among the first summer interns at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesen Fellowship and continued his contact with Wright until the latter’s death. The influence of Wright’s Usonian principles encouraged Beal to develop a regional approach to design, especially as it related to climatic and social responses to the prairie environment. In 1938, he invented and published plans for the inside-outside heliodon, an instrument used to measure the effects of solar access on and within buildings (Beal, 1956). One of his students from the 1930s, Curtis Besinger, developed similar interests and entered the Fellowship in 1939, staying until 1955 as a senior apprentice. The convergence of these ideas resulted in a number of residential designs in Lawrence that combined Usonian planning principles, passive solar design, and energy conservation techniques. Beal’s own house, constructed in 1950, is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Beal was chair of the architecture program between 1945 and 1962, and he hired Besinger in 1955 to move the emphasis away from a Beaux Arts model to one devoted to the processes espoused by Wright and his own concepts of what would become ecological design. Besinger was a major presence on the architecture faculty until his retirement in 1984. Although there were no formal ties between psychology and architecture at KU until the 1970s there were a number of informal connections that had grown up between Paul Gump and the architecture program.
One KU student who was influenced by Beal and Besinger as well as Buckminster Fuller as a visiting professor of architecture was Bob Berkebile, a 1961 graduate. Berkebile was a founding partner in what would eventually become the Kansas City firm of BNIM Architects, the 2011 AIA Firm of the Year, and a founding member of both the AIA Committee on the Environment and the US Green Building Council. He was also the keynote speaker at EDRA 40 in Kansas City. Although Berkebile has been particularly prominent in the profession, his basic design sensibilities and pragmatic approach to problem-solving is not atypical of architects who have graduated from KU since the 1950s. It is fair to say that architectural education at KU for the past seventy years has produced designers who have been sensitive to broad and sophisticated design principles as well as attuned to the specific climatic, cultural, and social conditions that shape life in the Midwest. As Steve Grabow summarized this general impulse in his introduction to Vitruvius on the Plains (2012), KU graduates are characterized by “…an affinity for rational and scientific approaches to architectural design and an openness to experimentation and, finally, by an aesthetic sensibility that is at once historically cultivated and socially humane.” (13)
By the late 1960s, therefore, the parallel disciplines of ecological psychology and architecture had evolved into two relatively mature educational models, even though they were unconnected in any but the most loose and idiosyncratic fashion. What does connect them not only to each other but also the larger context of the Midwest is their dedication to the study of and manipulation of human habitations – what we have called place and place making. In this respect the ways that social scientists embedded themselves in settings to study the human aspects of place and the degree to which designers took their essentially functional cues from a definitive process of place making is the key ingredients in defining the qualities of subsequent Environment Behavior processes. With the retirement of Barker in 1971 and the closing of the Midwest Field Station in 1972, as well as the change in emphasis of ecological psychology in the broader environmental psychology movement, the focus of EB studies at KU shifted to architecture in the mid-1970s.
EDRA 6 at KU
In 1968, Charles Kahn was hired to lead the newly formed School of Architecture and Urban Design, and the architecture program was moved out of the School of Engineering. Kahn had come from North Carolina and brought with him the influences of the Bauhaus curriculum of Black Mountain and Buckminster Fuller. His hiring was a conscious effort to reinforce Beal’s goal of moving architectural education away from the formalism of the Beaux Arts model and Coastal aesthetic domination. Kahn’s early faculty hires reflected this focus as well as his own commitment to social activism. Fount Smothers was hired in 1969 to initiate the sequence of courses that Kahn conceived as a way to bring the curriculum in line with the nascent design methods movement. Smothers was involved in the subsequent founding of the Architectural Research Centers Consortium in 1976, and brought a range of visiting critics to Lawrence to build the connections to graduate programs active at this time in design analytics. These included Will Oberdick from Michigan, Horst Rittel from Berkeley, and Mike Brill from Buffalo. Smothers also was responsible for fostering the intellectual connections between architecture and psychology, systems engineering, and the business school at KU. Basil Honikman joined the faculty in 1972 after completing his doctorate at the University College London, where he was influenced by a confluence of scientific approaches to design analysis and a focus on social processes in determining built forms. Steve Grabow was hired in 1973 after post-graduate work at Berkeley. His connection to the early design methods and environmental psychology movements would lead him to write Christopher Alexander: The Search for a New Paradigm in Architecture (1983), as well as focus his later hiring choices when he became the program chair in the late 1970s and early 80s. Finally, Jim Mayo joined the new urban planning faculty and would subsequently contribute to the literature of built places as cultural landmarks.
It was a natural outcome of Kahn’s conscious construction of the architecture faculty that Honikman was asked by the EDRA board to host the sixth conference in Lawrence in 1975. Christopher Alexander was the keynote speaker, and papers were published by individuals that brought together the early work of the Midwest Field Station as well as those who were to mentor subsequent faculty hires and collaborate with future KU design and research initiatives. These included Kevin Lynch, John Eberhard, Geoffrey Broadbent, Amos Rapaport, Paul Gump, Mike Brill, and Bob Bechtel. The title of the conference – “Responding to Social Change” – was a major theme in the Environment Behavior community from EDRA’s inception in 1969 and paralleled the social activism that was transforming global concepts of civil rights, freedom of expression, and economic justice. Honikman (1975) summarized this attitude in the conference introduction. “For me, the only valid purpose for environmental design and research is contributing to making certain that the man-made and man-influenced environment enhances the quality of life which takes place within it.” (1) It is interesting almost a half century later to scan the contents of the EDRA 6 proceedings and see the intellectual soup brewing in the various fields of ecological and environmental psychology, design methods, cultural anthropology, social activism, design practice, participatory design, and systems theory.
The primary result of EDRA 6 on the architectural program at KU was to move the faculty in a direction that reinforced its commitment to incorporating social and ecological analyses into the design process. The emphasis on place after EDRA 6 was evident with the creation of the Built Form & Culture (BF&C) graduate option in the Master of Architecture program in the late 1970s. Under Grabow’s leadership, a series of faculty hires were made between 1979 and 1984 to fill teaching and research positions in the option. It should also be noted that Curtis Besinger continued to play a central role in the architectural curriculum, influencing two generations of students and faculty throughout this period. His final book, Working for Mr. Wright: What It Was Like (1995), was a personal record of his twenty-year association with Frank Lloyd Wright and the ways he shaped the thinking and practice of Midwest architects. Another contributor to the history of the Prairie School was Dennis Domer, the Associate Dean of Architecture at KU between 1977 and 2000 and later professor at the University of Kentucky. He has been active in the preservation of the physical fabric of Lawrence (including the preservation of Beal’s 1950 house) and documenting the intellectual foundations of a number of the designers who shaped the traditions of the built environment of the Great Plains (Alfred Caldwell, 1997).
Built Form & Culture
Victor Papanek was hired as the first J.L. Constant Chair of Architecture in 1981 to form the central focus of the BF&C program, although the core faculty and academic curriculum were in place prior to his arrival in Lawrence. In the late 1970s and early 80s, a number of faculty were hired who would each contribute to the formation of BF&C and would also represent the second generation of academics to be mentored by the founders of the Environment Behavior and design methods movements. Harris Stone established a sequence of theory and history courses that argued for the primacy of social and cultural forces to be the central factors in guiding architects in the design process. He would author four books; the last, Dispersed Cities of the Plains, would crystalize his social activism in the specific context of the Midwest. David Saile brought his focus on indigenous settlements of the American Southwest to build an argument for the importance of vernacular processes of environmental design and became the director of the BF&C program throughout its formative years. Bill Carswell worked closely with Saile and the BF&C faculty to bring national attention to the program, and the two organized the first two international conferences in Lawrence that brought together more than 100 designers and researchers to debate and solidify a cultural and ethnographic approach to environment research.
At this same time four additional faculty were hired to contribute to both the BF&C and professional design programs. Coincidentally, these new faculty also represented the generation of students who had studied at KU in the late 1960s and early 70s and were each mentored by seminal scholars in the EB movement. Steve Padget came to the faculty after completing a graduate degree at the University College London under the supervision of Bill Hillier and his space syntax group. Padget would later work in association with Bob Berkebile and BNIM to develop the firm’s sustainability expertise. Kent Spreckelmeyer returned to KU after graduate work at Michigan with Bob Marans, Jonathan King, and Bob Johnson and began teaching courses in building evaluation, programming, and design analysis. Another Michigan graduate, Frank Zilm, was appointed the director of facilities at the KU Medical Center in 1977, and he and Spreckelmeyer would initiate programs in architectural management and healthcare facility research. Donna Luckey joined the faculty in 1983 after completing her doctorate at Berkeley with Horst Rittel. She would contribute to the design analysis sequence in the professional program and concentrate her research and graduate focus on land management strategies in rural settings and developing countries until her retirement in 2011.
By the mid-1980s Environment Behavior research and design processes were thoroughly embedded in the professional architectural curriculum at KU and formed the dominant graduate and research emphases. Students competed successfully in both design and research competitions, and there was an increasing recognition that this approach to design education should be focused at the doctoral level as well as the accredited architectural degree program. An important consequence of the BF&C program was the encouragement it gave both faculty and students to look for ways to create tangible connections between human use of the environment and the act of designing those environments. Harris Stone originated a summer institute in Italy that focused on the preservation of Tuscan settlements in which he emphasized the concept of “hands on, mind on” to describe the haptic ways designers move between the abstract and the concrete to create built space. This impulse was also apparent in the preservation work being done in local and regional sites by faculty and students, and it formed the foundations for what would become the hallmark of architectural education at KU from the mid-1990s to the present.
Place Making at KU
One of the most significant faculty additions made by Steve Grabow in the early 1980s was Dan Rockhill, who was hired to reshape and lead the building technology sequence in the architecture curriculum. Rockhill was a student of Mike Brill and received his graduate degree from SUNY Buffalo in 1976. At the encouragement of Brill, who was a participant at EDRA 6 in Lawrence, he brought the idea of combining the processes of design and construction to KU. He built a successful career in residential construction throughout the 1980s and early 90s, and defined the building construction sequence in the curriculum as one which could only be understood by having students build their designs at full scale using real materials. This ethic of place making spread throughout the design studios, and by 1995 almost all levels of both undergraduate and graduate students were designing and building real environments for specific human uses. In the spring of 1995 Harris Stone was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and Rockhill used his graduate design studio – ARCH 804 – to complete the restoration of Harris’ last preservation project, a one-room schoolhouse on the outskirts of Lawrence. Since that time students, in what would eventually become the not-for-profit enterprise Studio 804, Inc., have built award-winning residences, classrooms, research labs, and auditoriums throughout Kansas. Rockhill has occupied the J.L. Constant Chair at KU since 2004.
The effects of this focus on place making in the architectural programs have been to shift the professional curriculum in ways that bring students in direct contact with the realities of transforming human needs into physical form. It was also recognized that the professional Master of Architecture degree needed to be balanced by research programs at the doctoral level. The architecture program secured Kansas Regents approval to form a Ph.D. program in 2006, and Keith Diaz Moore was hired to chair the architecture program and guide the doctoral program formation. Moore brought an expertise in environments for ageing, which can be traced from the work of Leon Pastalan at Michigan to his thesis advisor Jerry Weisman at Milwaukee. One of his first tasks was to build academic and professional options to parallel the design/build emphases begun by Rockhill. Mahbub Rashid, a faculty member at KU since 2005, was appointed as the director of the Ph.D. program. He completed his doctoral degree with an emphasis in space syntax and urban morphology under John Peponis at Georgia Tech. Rashid also had built a national reputation in the analysis of critical care environments, and Moore used this as a platform to ask Zilm and Spreckelmeyer to create an academic concentration in healthcare design. The Health & Wellness program built on their previous work with Richard Branham (a collaborator with Paul Gump in a number of doctoral theses) in the industrial design program on full-scale simulations of emergency, family practice, and inpatient environments. The central feature of the Health & Wellness option in the architectural curriculum was a seven-month internship in which students were placed in firms doing significant research and design in healthcare environments. Marie Alice L’Heureux joined the faculty in 2003 after receiving her doctorate from Berkeley working with Galen Cranz and Claire Coper Marcus in the study of the political and social forces that have driven environmental design in Eastern Europe, and she has been a primary faculty mentor for doctoral students at KU since 2008.
By 2007 environment behavior research and design processes in the architecture program at KU could trace a thirty-year history of placing human responses to the built environment at the center of its academic and scholarly missions. It could trace its origins not only from the foundations of ecological psychology but also to a rich history of Midwest pragmatism and self-reliance. Like much of life, the effects of this history would manifest themselves in a happy – or in this case tragic – accident.
Greensburg and the Prelude to EDRA 40
On May 4, 2007, an F-5 tornado destroyed 95 percent of the small Kansas community of Greensburg. Most people who have not been to the Midwest are likely to associate the place with the endless seas of prairie grass and tornados; what might be called the “Wizard of Oz” complex. For this narrative the destruction of Greensburg provides a confluence of the many stands of Environment Behavior research and design at KU that we have outlined above. The town was destroyed exactly fifty years after Barker and Wright established the Midwest Field Station in a Kansas town of the same size and configuration. The question the Greensburg residents faced on May 5th was “How – and possibly if – should we rebuild the town?” The early years of the twenty-first century have seen the steady and accelerating decline of the economic, social, and physical lives on the Great Plains. There was not an automatic assumption that the revival of Greensburg was even feasible. Fortunately, the work of Barker and his colleagues had always tapped a deep root of Midwest pragmatism and optimism that established a touchstone for the Greensburg residents. The essential premise of Big School, Small School was that local resolve and intimate collections of people – behavior settings – are the critical metrics for guiding environmental choices and design intents.
Within a few months of the town’s destruction, Bob Berkebile and the firm he founded had outlined a design process and a physical vision that would commit the community to rebuilding Greenburg using the LEED Platinum standards for sustainability and energy conservation. Using an ongoing series of participatory design sessions, the firm redesigned the town to meet the expectations for achieving a self-sufficiency in energy generation, water and refuge conservation, and a commitment to aesthetic quality. Greensburg today has the highest number of LEED certified buildings per capita of any place in America, is 100 percent reliant on wind-powered and solar energy sources, and has set national standards for water and waste recycling and management. Berkebile, in his 2009 keynote at EDRA 40, attributed his and the firm’s vision of environmental sustainability to the lessons learned in Beal’s KU curriculum and the connections that were made with visionaries like Fuller and Besinger.
By the beginning of the fall 2007 semester at KU, Dan Rockhill and twenty graduate students had committed to the 5.4.7. Arts Center in Greensburg to design and build a LEED Platinum facility as their Studio 804 project for that academic year. The project would become the first Platinum building in the state of Kansas on its completion in June, 2008, and the design featured both photovoltaic and wind-powered electrical generation, geothermal heating and cooling, and reclaimed wood siding from an abandoned ammunition plant in Desoto, Kansas. Like previous Studio 804 projects, the building was constructed in modular units in Lawrence and shipped to Greensburg for final assembly and finishing on site. The mission statement of the Center is a summation of the degree to which the community has made a commitment to refashion itself after its 2007 destruction. “The arts are extremely important to our community. The arts are very important to maintain and build our community, our identity, our heritage, and our culture. Art is a visual and tactile experience that we all long for. Each of us has a desire to create something with our own hands that reflects who we are.”
The Wichita architectural firm Health Facilities Group (HFG) was under commission at the time of the May 2007 tornado to study the feasibility of replacing the Kiowa County critical access hospital (CAH) and shifted their focus to fit within the vision of rebuilding the town as a self-sustaining and environmentally sensitive community. Using many of same principles established by BNIM’s master planning process, HFG’s final design for the replacement hospital was the first LEED Platinum CAH in the country and incorporated a range of energy conservation and local power generation concepts. The important connection that this project has to the architecture program at KU came in 2017 when HFG became an Affiliate Firm in the Health & Wellness program and now is a central research partner in establishing rural healthcare facility standards in a grant from the Facility Guidelines Institute.
The last stream of this confluence of factors that can be traced to the environmental initiatives that began at KU in the late 1940s is the rebuilding of the Kiowa County school system. This was also a BNIM designed project, and is probably most closely related in concept and form to the principles that Barker and Gump outlined in Big School, Small School in 1964. Resisting the logical impulse to simply consolidate the school with an adjacent district, the school board made the decision to bring all the educational programs of the community into a single facility and, in essence, recreate a “single-room schoolhouse” for grades pre-K to 12. The current enrollment averages approximately twenty students per year level, considerably below the 100 minimum students recommended by James Conant in 1959 (Bard, 2006), and the average student teacher ratio in the school is 5:1.
The convergence of events at Greensburg was a major impetus to host EDRA 40 in Kansas City in 2009. The conference was co-directed by L’Heureux and Rashid and its theme and proceedings title – The Ethical Design of Places – was a natural response to the ways Environment Behavior processes can and should be used to fashion human-centered designs and place making. Berkebile’s keynote address – “Transforming the World by Design” – brought together his personal journey from his early exposure to George Beal’s heliodon, Curtis Besinger’s Prairie School sensibilities, and Buckminster Fuller’s scientific bases of design with the parallel and essential foundations of the Environment Behavior movement at KU in the 1940s.
The Latest Generation
In the past ten years the KU architecture faculty has continued to build on the research and professional programs that have been outlined above. Kapila Silva joined the program in 2007 after completing his Ph.D. at Milwaukee under the supervision of Amos Rapaport. He has enhanced the emphasis on the preservation of historically significant places, especially those with World Heritage status. He is also the trustee for Rapaport’s Digital Image Archive on Vernacular Design, which is now a part of KU’s digital library holdings. He is the co-editor of Asian Heritage Management: Contexts, Concerns and Prospects (2013). In 2009, Chad Kraus was hired after being mentored at Kansas State by David Seamon, graduate work at McGill with Alberto Pérez-Gómez, and professional practice with Shigeru Ban to develop additional coursework in the design/build programs. His primary research focus has been on rammed-earth technologies and building systems, which continues the early work in this area at KU dating from the 1940s. He is the editor of the 2017 book Designbuild Education, which brings together the major theories and practices of this emerging form of design education. Hui Cai was recruited to KU in 2014 from practice and the completion of her doctoral degree with Craig Zimring at Georgia Tech. She is now the director of research in the Institute of Health & Wellness Design and incorporates a range of evidence-based design methodologies in inpatient environments, patient-centered medical home systems, and, in conjunction with the Institute’s Affiliate Firms, studies to revise the space standards for rural healthcare facilities.
Finally, the new generation of scholars in the architecture program now includes fifteen doctoral graduates, a number of whom are active in EDRA and the EB field in general. Julie Lawless was the first KU doctoral graduate in architecture in 2012, where she focused on the definition and design of home-like spaces to support the process of assimilating to university life in congregate student housing environments. She is now an adjunct faculty member in KU’s urban planning program. Sharmin Kader is a 2016 graduate whose dissertation was the development of post-occupancy protocols for hospice environments. She is the director of research of at TreanorHL Architects and an EDRA board member. Both faculty and students continue to build academic and scholarly relationships with colleagues at KU in engineering, geology, medicine, nursing, social work, public health, history, and gerontology. Unfortunately, there have been no formal ties between architecture and psychology since the 1970s.
Reflections on the KU Environment Behavior Legacy
To return to the “Wizard of Oz” trope, remember what Dorothy said when she and Toto awoke from their whirlwind journey; “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” The point of this paper is we certainly are in Kansas, and we always have been. One of the primary criticisms of the work that emerged from the Midwest Field Station was that it had sacrificed objectivity for an intimate knowledge of and commitment to a specific place and people. This critique has run throughout all the subsequent annual conferences, scholarly papers, compendiums, and graduate theses of the various disciplines of what might be generously collected under the Environment Behavior umbrella. In the past seventy years, countless silos have been constructed and filled with endless harvests of data and opinion. The lesson of what has evolved at KU is that the processes of understanding and making places for human habitation can – and perhaps should – be viewed as interdependent and inseparable human activities. It would be interesting to imagine what might not have emerged if Barker and Beal were not committed from the beginning to insist their missions were essentially local in resolve and intimate in scale. The standards of LEED, for example, are valid only in that they respond to and measure building performance in a microcosm of climatic, economic, and social conditions. The design build process makes sense only if the professional barriers between conceiving and executing built places are removed. This, in our opinion, is the Environment Behavior legacy of KU.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the following individuals for their assistance. Ed Morris, from the University of Kansas, hosted the 47th International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences in Lawrence in June, 2015, and provided invaluable insights on the historical foundations of the Midwest Psychological Field Station. Allan Wicker was a reviewer of the abstract and spent time in Lawrence discussing the final paper and placing the work of Barker and Wright in the wider context of psychology and design. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the many kindnesses, professional courtesies, and encouraging words that Bob Bechtel shared over the years with everyone at EDRA in general and his colleagues from KU in particular. Bob passed away on January 16, 2018, and this conference and the entire organization will be sadder without him.
References
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