Estate Living Digital Publication Issue 4 April 2015 | Page 43

Curro School Langebaan

Building a

knowledge

environment

Educators, like architects, are seen to
be in the business of building edifices;
the former in terms of associations
(understanding the links from Point A
to Point Z) and the latter in terms of
structure (ensuring that the foundations
support the roofing).

“

However,
education and
architecture
are not actually
governed by such
immutable rules.

WikiHouse is an ‘open-source platform
for designing and sharing house designs
that anyone can manufacture and
assemble in days with no construction

skills’. Its founder, Alastair Parvin, believes
that, over time, architects have come
to serve the top 1% of the population,
similar to how real education, historically,
only benefited a very small percentage of
the overall population.
Parvin wants architecture to serve
100% of the population. He questions
the notion that ‘architecture is about
making buildings’ and says it should be
about ‘solving problems and creating
new conditions’. The same can also be
said about education, which is not just
about learning about multiplication and
memorising dates, but about ‘solving
problems’.
To support his argument, Parvin tells the
story of an architectural firm hired by a
school to solve the problem of congestion

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