Rethinking School Design

https://architizer.com/blog/practice/details/education-architecture-changing-views-childhood/

by samsolomon • 2 years ago

55 67 2 years ago

Meanwhile, educational results seem to get worse!

BTW, I went to those horrible school buildings the article talks about, and experienced none of the bad effects claimed.

giantg211• 2 years ago

I see no mention of the guiding principles for schools of the past. They were built to be cheap, long lasting, and durable (storm shelters). Every one of these newer building looks like a high priced and high maintenance design. I don't see any problem with the old bland cinderblock design. I feel that much of the psychology around the building looks is forgetting that people get used to things and that bland isn't necessarily bad if the other content and decor are the primary focus (as they should be Inna school).

ricardobeat• 2 years ago

Every one of these newer building looks like a high priced and high maintenance design

Not really possible to judge from pictures, as it depends on material selection, durability etc. Good architects can make nice things without breaking the bank.

giantg211• 2 years ago

Just cleaning the vaulted ceilings and all the high windows is a big difference that can be seen in the pictures. Multiple large windows are also a contraindication for it being a storm shelter.

jimbob45• 2 years ago

Even worse when the school building is aesthetically designed for a limited number of viewpoints or even just one viewpoint.

My own school growing up had a boring rear entrance but a brochure-worthy front entrance that looked traditional and dignified. Unfortunately, that front entrance was virtually never used since the playgrounds and parking lots were much closer to the rear entrance. As a result, us kids were sentenced to staring at the boring posterior of the school and never took away much inspiration from the architecture.

giantg211• 2 years ago

I'd be more concerned with a lack of inspiration from the schooling. Relying on architecture is a poor lesson in inspiration and creativity. People with creative mindsets can create beauty in how they decorate and use the space, just as much or even more so than relying on the space design itself.

lo_zamoyski• 2 years ago

These sorts of schools were modeled after prisons (and actually were designed by the same people designing prisons).

Architecture that looks bad is effectively communicating to its occupants what the institution running it thinks of them and what the institution is about. If you model it like a prison, then think about what this communicates and internalizes.

Before the prison/factory campus came into existence, we did have beautiful schools. And they're still standing.

giantg211• 2 years ago

"These sorts of schools were modeled after prisons (and actually were designed by the same people designing prisons)."

TFA says this is mostly legend more than fact.

"Before the prison/factory campus came into existence, we did have beautiful schools. And they're still standing."

This is survivor bias and tends to include expensive private schools and higher education. Most of those designs have similar "negative" features that the article describes as many of them are gothic, built in a time when glass was limited in size or expense, etc.

"If you model it like a prison, then think about what this communicates and internalizes."

Have the kids spent time in a prision? If the kids don't have a baseline for a what a prison is like, then this conjecture about what it communicates is moot as the fundamental exchange of the idea isn’t present. People reiterating that they are built like prisons are more detrimental than the design itself.

nemo44x3• 2 years ago

It's because they're built by tax dollars and the last thing you want to do is be seen to be wasting tax dollars on frivolous things. Nice private schools look great because the clientele expects that and pays for that aesthetic. Also consider that often the highest tax payers and most influential people in a community won't send their kids to the local school so have no interest in having higher taxes fund a nice building. I'm not saying that's good or bad, just that it is.

Before the prison/factory campus came into existence, we did have beautiful schools. And they're still standing.

The nice ones are. There are likely many old school buildings that were cheaply constructed and didn't stand the test of time.

The nice old school building in my town had to have hundreds of millions of dollars put into it because it didn't have AC, a staircase collapsed, and about 100 other serious issues that needed addressing to modernize it. Our community voted YES to funding it through a raise in property taxes but our community is already affluent and the town did a good job specifying exactly what the money would be spent on.

So it costs money and often times people don't see the value in that.

xemoka• 2 years ago

This was very much my first thought as well, that the costs of these buildings are far higher than schools of the past. It's good to want nice things, but there is a tradeoff.

There is a new highschool being built in my community to replace an aging one. The time and cost overruns of the custom designed building, featuring a towering atrium/lobby and ascetically pleasing frontage, has pushed back the move-in date to midsemester/next year.

Part of me loves that these schools look so much nicer and contain an environment better than the ones I went to growing up---another part of me knows that we have _many_ schools that need replacing of the same age as this new one's predecessor, and hardly a budget capable of doing so if they all are to be completed similarly.

Our drive and desire for "nicer" things (or at least things that dress up well), when we can barely fund the necessities, seems to be a hard dichotomy to deal with. How do we accomplish both?

rachofsunshine2• 2 years ago

This feels like a very important question: why the hell don't we seem to be able to do this efficiently, despite our vast resources and all the advances we've made in engineering, materials science, and automation in recent decades?

As much as the leftie in me wants to say we're not funding it, we are. Per-student, inflation-adjusted funding for education has gone up a full 50% in my lifetime [1], to more than $18k per student-year. $18k is a lot - for a classroom of 30 students, that's half a million dollars a year. We have the money, and indeed far more money than we once had, in a world where things are cheaper and easier. We should be able to do everything we did generations ago and then some. Sure, there are demands we make now that we didn't make then (like "maybe not with the asbestos", "kids with wheelchairs should be able to get places", and "maybe people with learning disabilities should get a chance"), but I have a hard time believing that those are adding >50% in real terms.

To me, the interesting question isn't the trade-offs, it's why we need to make them at all. It seems like we shouldn't.

The most appealing explanation to me is that there's a sort of low-grade hum of background corruption that is hard to detect but acting as a sort of friction on public-works projects. But that's hard enough to falsify that it's hard to be too confident in it, either.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/203118/expenditures-per-...

voisin• 2 years ago

Our drive and desire for "nicer" things (or at least things that dress up well), when we can barely fund the necessities, seems to be a hard dichotomy to deal with. How do we accomplish both?

Check out the book and concept “Pretty Good House”. You can have nice design without breaking the bank by making the right trade offs in the design process. I think this can be adapted to institutions. Probably ICF walls for high insulation values and lower operating costs, slanted roofs for lower maintenance, heat pumps, larger windows on certain facades for light and interior enjoyment without bringing in intense summer heat (also, overhangs on southern windows), modest entries, etc etc.

Another idea: I don’t understand why every school is designed by a different architect starting at a blank page (even within the same school board let alone the same state/province). Why don’t they have standard sets of optimized designs for different size institutions and figure out all the mechanical and electrical and structural once at the beginning and use the same design for 10-20 years with only small refinements as technology progresses? Lots of money is being wasted on consultants.

maxglute2• 2 years ago

Evidenced based design studies on how some designs better than others at promoting healing in hospital design. Not familiar with school studies but I imagine at some point schools should be calibrated to facilitate learning instead of storm shelters (or in US, securitized against shooters). IIRC old enviromental-psych, "nice" enviroments reduce stress, increase attention etc. Regardless why get used to bland? It's good to just be in a nice built enviroment.

giantg211• 2 years ago

My point is, what defines "nice" is based on one's experience. If you get people used to luxury, they will demand it and see declines if it's not met. Most of the hospital improvements are not about having pretty rooms. The pretty rooms are usually only one part of a much bigger group of changes to make things more tolerable. Those other changes are likely bigger factors in comfort.

pcaharrier2• 2 years ago

Do these design changes drive a change in the philosophy of education or is it the other way around? The author of the article doesn't dive into that issue very much, but if a change in the architecture of schools will help drive some much-needed changes in education itself (the "rigidity" mentioned throughout) so much the better.

giantg211• 2 years ago

Some people might see a certain level of rigidity to be beneficial to a child's development. Now we need to get into philosophical debate over the potential psychological impacts of design. I imagine the stoics would disagree that discipline is a bad thing (actual discipline and not punishment).

pcaharrier2• 2 years ago

Discipline and structure are good and necessary, but that's not what I'm getting at (and I think we probably agree there) when I say "rigidity." Students (especially young children) aren't widgets to be pushed through a factory, but individuals for whom some degree of flexibility is required.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 2 years ago

Given the shrinking demographic, it's difficult to see why anyone would bother. Whatever problems schools have, it's not the architecture.

jrsdav• 2 years ago

The unfortunate trend I’ve witnessed in newer schools in my neck of the US (west) is to essentially make them fortresses, a place where entrances and exits are tightly controlled and each classroom can quickly be locked down. They honestly feel like prisons.

We all remarked on the classroom during back to school week this year for my third grader with “wow, you get an actual window this year!”. Other classrooms in the school have no windows or natural lighting at all.

One guess as to why this is becoming the norm.

JRandomHacker42• 2 years ago

Jacob Geller did a really interesting video essay [1] about the parallels that can be drawn between modern school architecture and maps from shooter games - on top of whatever other context or functionality they provide, they are fundamentally spaces that are designed around the question "what happens if violence occurs here?"

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usSfgHGEGxQ

vundercind• 2 years ago

It’s deeply fucked-up if you look at the odds of an indiscriminate shooting (what we’re mainly worried about—less so the killer seeking a single specific victim who happens to choose to find them in a school) occurring while a given student is present any time in their 13 years of primary and secondary education. Loosen it to “any gun violence at all” (a way, way larger category) and the odds are still tiny.

School shootings are shameful and we should take steps to make them stop, but subjecting all kids to freakishly locked-down buildings and shooter drills and all that is not a reaction supported by the statistics. We’re causing mass harm to kids over a panic.

timeon3• 2 years ago

Can't imagine to grow in environment like that. Luckily, guns are regulated here and people can walk free.

rawgabbit• 2 years ago

You are lucky. When my son was in elementary school ten years ago, it cost a fortune for the school to put in a secure entrance. It was like a castle gate house where you enter the main door and it immediately locks behind you. You state your business through an intercomm and then they unlock the inner door.

spankalee• 2 years ago

These look like schools with lots of space and lots of funding.

Meanwhile, where I live, schools don't even have fields, gyms, or kitchens because there's not enough room on the lot. Urban vs suburban design constraints are just really large.

I'd like to see more exploration of school designs for urban environments.

Can we make the schools taller? Does that need better stairways and maybe escalators? What are the implications? Older kids on the upper floors so the littler ones don't have to climb stairs as much?

Can we put fields on the roof?

How can we be more efficient with services? Can we combine schools and public libraries? Rec centers?

Growing up in a good suburbanish school system myself, it's pretty depressing to see what passes for elementary schools in some cities.

timeon3• 2 years ago

How can we be more efficient with services? Can we combine schools and public libraries? Rec centers?

Using the facilities 'after-school' is good idea.

hendersonreed• 2 years ago

Look at Japan - schools in Tokyo are extremely space-efficient (like most of Tokyo) and have innovations like rooftop playgrounds (with high, safe fences).

variaga• 2 years ago

Call this a cautionary tale about 'rethinking' school design.

The high school I went to was designed/built in 1973 by some people who "re-thought" school design. Their idea was a 'flexible learning space' - basically a giant open-plan area where different classes would just sort of sit in circles in one big room. Certain rooms - the library, admin offices, the science labs - were walled off individually but most general classes would just be in this big open space. Teachers were assigned rolling desks with a locking roll-top that they could move around to whatever spot on the floor their class would be in that day, kids would circle the desks around and creativity would thrive (or something...)

This plan was basically a disaster. Getting a bunch of teenagers to focus on a lesson is hard enough without the distraction of dozens of other classes within visible/audible range. Within the first year they retrofit the whole building with walls to break the big open space up into conventional classrooms. The walls were vinyl panels stretched between the structural columns - if you pressed on them, they would flex noticeably. It worked well enough, but one side effect of the late addition of walls was that the HVAC had been designed for one big room with a few 'zones' of control. When all the vinyl walls went in, they didn't align to the 'zones' so there would be a thermostat in one room, but the heat/AC vent(s) would be in other rooms, leading to some classrooms constantly being too-hot or too-cold.

20 years after this (the '90s, when I attended) there was still one room filled with the long-unused rolling desks with locking roll-tops.

sidewndr46• 2 years ago

Someone did that where I went to high school as well. I'm pretty sure it was a cost cutting measure, but the entire school was basically built without hallways. In one of the most humid and rainiest locales in the continental United States. Changing classes? Enjoy the rain! Someone stands there with the door open? Enjoy the 80% humidity condensing on everything in the room! Need to go the restroom at 2 PM? High temperature is only 100 F, but with the heat island effect the air temperature is a completely normal 120 F

mortenjorck• 2 years ago

I went to a middle school in the 1990s that clearly came out of the same 1970s wave of “rethinking school design.” Ours had the benefit of the what-were-we-thinking retrofit walls being proper drywall, but, perhaps in trying to dodge the climate control problems you mention, most classrooms still didn’t have doors.

I wouldn’t learn what the Lindy effect was until decades later, but looking back, it was an instructive early lesson.

potato3732842• 2 years ago

You can "re think" things all you want but so long as the administrators have every incentive to run the place like some perverse combination of a minimum security prison and a locked mental health facility all the terribleness will remain because the organizations, the processes they adopt and the buildings they inhabit are a reflection of the incentives that shape them.

rsolva• 2 years ago

What we really should do, is rethinking School. The design of the buildings is not the problem. The Sudbury Valley model is a fascinating take on a different kind of educational environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYHKbbLk7V4

EDIT: That said, these schools looks like they could be a good fit for a Sudbury-style school :)

ziddoap• 2 years ago

I don't think this is an either/or situation. Both can be rethought.

janalsncm• 2 years ago

A second-order benefit of schools being more inviting spaces for students is that they are also nicer for teachers. Maybe this would allow schools to tap into a larger talent pool. Of course in China teachers are also paid well, so that helps too.

nonameiguess• 2 years ago

It's always interesting to me to see sweeping statements about what things are like from people who have experienced only a very small sample of possibilities across the space they're commenting on. My schools were nothing like a prison. In fact, we had a juvenile prison in my hometown that was called a "school for boys," as well a continuation school, which is where they sent everyone who wasn't a criminal but had been expelled from the other schools. They both looked drastically different from the regular schools. We had no hallways. It was all open air between classes. Windows were abundant.

My wife was surprised by this the first time she saw my high school, as she'd grown up in the northeast and the schools were indoors and more like what this article describes. It's always worth reminding ourselves as Americans that we live in a very big country that is not at all uniform from coast to coast.

henning• 2 years ago

This is what it looks like to live in a weird architectural design bubble where you think spoiled rich kid schools are all schools. Like an attractive person for whom regular people literally do not cognitively exist, the shitty schools all over the world that lack basic supplies and do not pay teachers enough do not exist, so we are free to think about cool architecture you can post pictures of on your portfolio.

nemo44x3• 2 years ago

For decades, school design was synonymous with rigidity. Rows of identical classrooms, harsh lighting and long, narrow corridors created environments that felt more like factories — or worse, prisons — than places for nurturing young minds.

...and those bastards went out and won World War 2. The end.

DowagerDave2• 2 years ago

so many rich (mostly white) kids!

troupo• 2 years ago

This article could've been written by ChatGPT. It's bland marketing spiel with feel-good emotions and nothing concrete.

Nothing exemplifies this more than the section on "Cultivating Imagination Through Playful Design". Despite the header it shows the most bland and generic "scandinavian design" imaginable with no place for either imagination or playfulness.

This is exactly how many of these soulless buildings are built by "jack of all trades and a soon-to-be Master of Architectures": by stringing together the most basic of shapes with utter disregard for history, culture, or context, and slapping meaningless word diarrhoea onto them.

havblue• 2 years ago

I cringe whenever I hear people praise Scandinavian schools: if we raise taxes and get rid of private schools, (to copy what they did in Norway) our public schools will be just as good. Copying Hermione Granger's homework does not make you Hermione Granger.

One amusing thing I noticed was the lack of stuff in the classrooms. At my kid's class there needs to be room for bags, books, television, a PC for testing, headphones, Chromebooks etc. no way all that would fit in these new-age spaces.

TheOtherHobbes• 2 years ago

These all look like an adult architect's idea of what kids should like, and not so much a kid's idea of what an appealing learning environment would look like.

They all have that blocky clean-lined repetitive modernist look. Quirky window placings and the odd splashes of colour don't hide the lack of variety, texture, or spontaneity. They're still very regimented spaces - all straight lines and grids. Some have some natural elements, but even those are very tightly controlled.

A few look like very small open plan startup offices.

Affric• 2 years ago

Agree to some extent but let me take it in a slightly different direction:

None of them seem to be in use.

Show me how they look at full occupancy. Let me see how they are for a year. Then I will judge.

The biggest problem with architecture copy, and what means it’s not journalism, is that it’s not post occupancy. It’s really rare that they show you how it looks and how it’s performing 10 years in.

kjellsbells• 2 years ago

The built-like-prison implies a sort of bad faith when other reasons could be viable, e.g., taxpayer resistance to extra expenditures, or the requirement to build a large number of schools, quickly, in the 1950-1970 period in response to the baby boom and the Civil Rights movement in the US.

I find these kinds of architectural pieces about as useful as browsing the concept cars at a motor show. Sure, pretty n all, but can you build them for a forty year lifespan? Can you build them cheaply enough to crank out dozens in the poorest parts of town, where the existing schools really are crumbling? Can you build them to adapt not just to what you see today but what you cant see tomorrow? Can you build for the fact that kids can be incredibly destructive, even on a good day?

I've lived through the 1930s school building with wooden desk era, the Brutalist era, the open-plan circle-time class layout era, the aluminum and glass (freezing in winter!) era, and all I can say is I wish these architects had to live with what they created.

jalapenos• 2 years ago

Seems whenever there's talk about improvement in education and schooling, and demands for yet more funds, everyone very carefully avoids the topic of what's actually important in education.

Instead it's always about superficial matters like this.

No, what's actually important is, for student X, 20 years from now, are they living a better life than they would otherwise have, as a result of the education services they received.

If you just paid attention to that metric, and rebuked every single other thing, the price, speed, and quality of all education would rapidly improve every single year.

That'd start first and foremost with what people are being taught, followed by a bunch of other important levers, and right at the bottom of the list would be the physical design of the school.

Sector suffers from an epidemic of bikeshedding.

watwut• 2 years ago

They look like schools that will need a lot of lighting, because they do not have enough windows. Plus they look like shopping centers from inside.

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