Marcus Adrian, AIA, LEED BD+C, a principal at Mackey Mitchell Architects, will be speaking at TEDxGatewayArch’s “Ripple Effect” event at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on October 27.
Adrian will discuss the architecture of schools and classrooms, and how design can be improved through a deeper understanding of human ability. The talk will focus on design strategies he’s developed for deaf and other specialized schools, and explain how those strategies can benefit every learner and every school.
Adrian’s interest in this topic began with one project – Central Institute for the Deaf School, in 1998. He was fascinated by the seemingly counter-intuitive idea that a deaf school should be as quiet as we can make it. That’s when he learned that human ability is a wildly complex thing, and poses limitless design challenges.
Marcus has been designing schools and classrooms around differences in human ability and human brain development. He started with designing around the auditory sense, including the acoustics of separation and reverberation and designing to elevate signal and reduce noise. Over the years, those signal-to-noise strategies have extended to the other senses, primarily the visual, to create better classrooms and schools. He had a major breakthrough when he realized signal and noise strategies apply to other dimensions of human ability beyond the sensory, including human social and cognitive development.
TEDxGatewayArch Ripple Effect begins at 5 p.m. with a Happy Hour, followed by 14 live Tedx talks. Tickets are $25 and are on sale now at www.tedxgatewayarch.org.
