Coop Himmelblau School 9 LA: a POE?
This Is Fascinating. Metropolis Magazine has conducted a POE on this 'out there' Coop Himmelblau school design.
They surveyed 200 students. Then the journalist / architecture critic produced this piece. It's truly interesting to compare the journalist's views with the snippets of the students' views provided by the example surveys ...
The side bar quotes are standard journalistic 'illustration'. The article itself is an interpretation of the 200 surveys. The standard Research evidence for the illustrative piece is nowhere to be seen. Personally I want to believe the journalist's conclusion: that the students like the quirkiness of the building and as arts students somehow see it as expressive of them. It's such a neat match. But then I read the survey examples. I am hard pressed to see in these how the conclusions could be drawn from the answers to these. Certainly the journalism keeps well away from any statement that might smack of statistically representing the views of the 200.
What's most disturbing about this article Is that this is a good read. It sounds convincing. It makes a convincing case - unless you think about all those students' opinions in the survey forms. For example: who is not intrigued to see the full range of opinions expressed in answer to the question complete this sentence: If I was the architect I would...
This is not a beat up about the trivialisation of information by the media. The question quoted above illustrates the problem I am sure faced the Journalist or the analyst-advisor. How on earth can anyone reasonably summarize open ended questions like that? And if there are several? It does not seem to be a well-designed survey form... It reads more like an inexperienced research student's first draft of a survey - full of interesting questions to ask, but with little clear concept of how to analyze.
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