How does the built environment affect children – their health, their behaviour, education and development? To support them, what do we need to consider and what do we need to do? Can our surroundings foster environmental and social awareness and responsibility? Based on Christopher Day's experiences designing schools and early childhood centres in the United States and Britain, this groundbreaking book sets out to answer these questions and to offer solutions.
Children all too often find themselves living in alien surroundings designed with the needs of adults in mind, cut off not just from the natural environment but also childhood itself. Society's reaction – to cocoon children from the outside world or to resort to drugs to control behaviour – fails to address the fundamental causes of problems which lie in the environment not the children themselves. One of the world's leading thinkers on the impact of buildings on people, Christopher Day's insights offer new light on one of the most important issues for today's society. Environment and Children/Day: Passive Lessons from the Everyday Environment talks about what our surroundings teach our children. It helps in designing environments that nourish imagination and creativity.
- Design by Adults - Experience by Children
- Childhood - A Journey
- Fundamental Needs
- Social Relationships and Place
- Issues of Health
- From Sensory Experience to Integrated Thinking
- Light and Darkness - Age and Situation
- Colour and Children
- What Places Say - Silent Lessons
- Places of Welcome
- Outdoor Places
- Environment for the Developing Child
- Learning to Care for the Environment
- Living with the Elements
- Making Nature's Cycles Visible
- Levels of Life
- Learning Sustainability Through Daily Experience
- Sustainable Schools
- From Ends to Means
Christopher Day trained as an architect and a sculptor. He designs buildings in line with the ecological principles of his books. Day is considered to be one of the founders of the ecological movement in Britain and is even better known in the United States. He has an international lecturing circuit as a result of influential publications such as 'Places of the Soul', 'A Haven for Childhood',and 'Building with Heart'.