Luling Land Lab

Luling, LA

This idea for new Land Lab combines 21^stcentury science teaching with community engagement and service learning. The Living Wall provides a teaching environment within which students can co-exist with living things - plants, animals, and insects - while they interact with local ecosystems and draw from global resources. Inside and outside the Land Lab, students learn by integrating classroom and laboratory studies with meaningful community service.

The Land Lab teaches respect, empathy, and responsibility through community partnerships and an intense interaction with living things and practical science. Students take ownership of their school and community, and learn from their experience in service activities such as community clean sweeps, campus enrichment, and tree plantings.

It is a component-based system of building, landscape, and technology, and is the size of a single classroom. The landscape incorporates and regenerates local ecosystems, and the Living Wall is specifically designed to incorporate a service learning curriculum. As an assembly, the Land Lab is flexible, reprogrammable, and portable. Luling is a nationally-recognized innovator in science education, and the new Lab design offers a prototype which can be adapted to landscapes in Louisiana and elsewhere simply by altering the way it connects to the ground.

Credits:
Collaboration with Laura Kurgan/ LOOK, Leslie Gill Architect