The Living Classroom

Design Patterns

Art, Music, Performance: It is the intention fo the Living Classroom to engage youth with media that is accessible and fun as well as insightful and expressive. We will be featuring two important artistic components in and around the classroom: A community based designed and drawn mural on the interior of the building; and public art scultpor on the living classroom site. The Living Classroom will feature a community designed and installed mural in the interior of the classroom becasue mural based art is such a critical expression of many San Francisco based communities--particulalry the Bayview Hunterspoint community. We will be featuring several rotating public art pieces on the site of the classroom in an effort to engage community youth around public art with the idea of beutifying the urban landscape in a multi dimensional way. We will work with youth and local artists to launch a public art curriculum which willl be able to train youth to think about the environment as the penultimate artistic expression, and how to navigate fabricated art within the natural, and unnatural environment (the city).

Daylight and Solar Energy: The Living Classroom will feature the City of San Francisco's first off-grid building-we are not "tying" into the PGE grid facility and feel this will really demonstrate the power and efficacy of solar technology. With this in mind, our building has intergrated many features that are compatible with a very sun friendly environment-we have almost a dozen skylights that we are going to feature which will provide high levels of heating for the building as well as feature the incredible site lines around the building. Our windows are all double glazed which will be able to capture the sun that we receive. One of the great benefits of our community is our incredibel weather microsystem. We have the most sun of any portion of the city, and the classroom will be housed in park that is surrounded by the San Francisco Bay which will provide incredible periods of strong sunlight to the site.

Connected to the Community: Living Classroom will be located in the heart of a community which has faced many environmental strugles over the last five decades. Literacy for Environmental Justice works to train youth around various advocacy issues: including food security via our cooking demonstration program and good neighbor efforts, prevention of obesity and asthma via our direct advocacy and support of healthull policy initiaives, as well as training y outh to think as designers and stewards of their environment via our nursery program and park stewardship activities. We are a community based organization founded in 1998 with the intention of making connections among youth, community business, educators, community advocates, and local community activists. The classroom will naturally fit into and be connected to all of our stakeholders who will find a home and a community center in the classroom. The mission and goal of our program in the classroom will be to create a diverse gathering space for both educators intersted in unique environmental curricula and hands on learning opportunities, businesses interested in cutting edge sustainable technology, as well as community advocates and environmentalists interested in advancing solutions to environmental problems. Our building's design was initially supported via a grant from a local city agency, was entirely designed by the community via series of community planning sessions. Our landscape plan has been developed, in partnership with a local community environmental leader, by community youth via a program called Community Geographers, where community youth were able to gain concrete landscape design skills while applying those skills to the LC site. This project is a community effort with a mission of being a unique facilitator of change for the community that created it and for future generations of community members.