In Monday’s New York Times, Allison Arieff wrote about nature’s declined state of influence in American school construction. [DesignInfo]

Some new schools, including LA’s private The Country School, are finding sustainable and modern solutions to the nation’s school design problem.

What amounts really to a sort of cubicle culture for kids is contributing to what author Richard Louv terms “nature deficit disorder” in his book “Last Child in the Woods.” In it, Louv describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them “diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses…nature deficit disorder can even change human behavior in cities, which could ultimately effect their design, since longstanding studies show a relationship between the absence, or inaccessibility, of parks and open space with high crime rates, depression, and other urban maladies.” A great quote from one of Louv’s thousands of interviews with children: “I like to play indoors better ‘cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”