Yestermorrow Design/Build School

The leading edge of the sustainable building movement is beginning to push the envelope beyond the greening of conventional buildings, into the territory of regenerative design and development – the process of integrating buildings, communities, and their inhabitants as healthy contributors to the living places of which they are a part.

This course begins with the practice essentials of building system integration – the process required to achieve affordable and effective environmental design (LEED, etc). Deeper technical system integration will also be addressed relating to the design of buildings that function as organisms – net positive energy generators and clean water contributors (Living Buildings).

Because sustainability is ultimately about sustaining all life, a mental model shift is required to work towards the next level – regenerative development. To ‘develop’ means to create new potential and this requires of us both inner and outer work. It is a process of shifting ourselves from being occupants of the land to becoming inhabitants – conscious participants in the co-evolution of life for the purpose of restoring and healing the whole system (Permaculture, Whole and Living Systems Thinking).

This course will teach the principles and processes required to design in a regenerative manner. Local sites will be explored to teach students the process of living system pattern understanding.

Competency Level: Intermediate to Professional
AIA credits: 35 -- Qualifies for HSW requirements.

Course Purpose

To help all attendees and stakeholders learn how to see the uniqueness of places through the exploration and understanding of interrelationships and patterns of life in each place, in a way that reveals the essential systemic connections extant at Yestermorrow as an example of the larger wholes in which places are nested, so that Yestermorrow and its students can improve their own long-term health and those of their broader communities as they grow and evolve together.

Course Objectives

Develop an understanding of the importance of working systemically and holistically with the patterns of place.
Develop a basic understanding of a process that participants can use to perceive interrelationships and patterns of systems and places.
Provide participants with the means to begin developing their capacity for using this pattern recognition as an essential tool for improving the health of their projects, their work, and their communities.

Sunday Evening - 13 June (7:00-9:00)
7:00 Introductions
Purpose of the Course
Overview of the regenerative design & development process, its importance, and its effects.

Technical System Integrative Design
Living System Design
Regenerative Design and Development - A Whole and Living System Process

Monday - 14 June
7:00 Exercises and Breakfast
9:00 Overview of the regenerative design & development process (continued)

Pattern recognition (physical/functional) and nested systems
Essence pattern recognition (next level)
Process "map" for implementing regenerative design & development

11:00 Outdoor observation skills exercise
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Update and review of work to date from last year's course
2:00 Outdoor pattern recognition skills exercises
4:30 Break and Dinner
7:00 Reflections and documentation of discoveries
Right brain music exercise

Tuesday - 15 June
7:00 Exercises and Breakfast
9:00 Essence patterns overview
Identify necessary fieldwork and research teams (changes - what, when, why occurred)

Biological/habitat patterns (mapping, watersheds, geology, soils, hydrology, flora, etc.)
Landscape structural patterns (built environment/infrastructure patterns)
Social and cultural/historical patterns

11:00 Organize small group field work and online research
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Small group field work continued - outer boundaries driving tour
4:30 Break and Dinner
7:00 Reflections and documentation of discoveries

Wednesday - 16 June
7:00 Exercises and Breakfast
9:00 Reflection and Essence patterns discussion
Identification of additional fieldwork
10:00 Small group field work continued
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Small group field work continued
4:00 Documentation of discoveries
Create timelines
5:30 Break and Dinner
7:00 Guest Lecture

Thursday - 17 June
7:00 Exercises and Breakfast
9:00 Reflections and assimilation of patterns being observed
Essence patterns discussion - large and small scale (site and valley)
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Team design sketches and documentation (including narrative)
4:30 Break and Dinner
7:00 First iteration design review
Reflections and documentation of discoveries

Friday - 18 June
7:00 Exercises and Breakfast
9:00 Team design sketches and documentation
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Design Presentations
4:30 Wrap Up and conclusions

Required Reading

Reading the Forested Landscape. Tom Wessels (is a book you will want to bring to class with you - either read beforehand or consult in the evenings as we study)

Being Nature's Mind, Indigenous Ways of Knowing. Zimmerman

Regenerative Design, Sustainable Design's Coming Revolution. Pamela Mang, Design Intelligence, 2002

Living Systems, the Internet and Human Future. Speech by Elisabet Sahtouris

Living Systems Design. Bill Reed

Gift of Good Land (Chapter 9, Solving for Pattern). Wendell Berry

Suggested Reading

The Integrative Design Guide to Green Building. 7group and Reed

The Living Universe. Duane Elgin

Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything. Ervin Laszlo

My Stroke of Insight. Jill Bolte Taylor

Patterning as Process. Marvick and Murphy

Regenerative Design (Chapters 1 and 2). Lyle