Sarah Scott (3)

Contemporary collections – often large glossy books that collect recent architecture of a particular building type or location – cater to the practicing architect more than anybody, as they offer a means of absorbing strategies and trends that may apply to a particular project. Perhaps because I'm not practicing at the moment, contemporary collections are low on my list of priorities; I'm not in a hurry to review them or search them out at bookstores. Yet there are exceptions that apply show more to other areas, such as writing and teaching. I picked up this book with day cares and schools for a design studio I was teaching. One of the projects, a Pre-K school in Queens, warranted some precedent studies and this book helped in that regard. It was also helpful because the author used a travel grant to visit notable schools around the world, not just in her native Australia. Her goal was to learn lessons that could be applied to schools in her home country, but for the rest of us the book is great for the firsthand accounts and a focus on use over aesthetics. Among other things, the book helped me greatly toward making a lecture for the design studio project, to get the students thinking about the important design considerations in environments for children. show less