Rethinking School Design
architizer.com
architizer.com
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Sichuan_earthquake#Collap...
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.
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.
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.
If the school was properly organized it could be in an actual prison for all would have cared. I think de-streaming is far worse than bad decor.
> 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.
"The nice ones are. There are likely many old school buildings that were cheaply constructed and didn't stand the test of time."
Yes, that's what survivor bias means.
I understand that which is why I described it to a person that appeared to not be familiar with it. I wasn’t speaking to you though. So I’m not sure why you’re replying to me about it lol.
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?
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-...
Schools have more features than 75 years ago- better hvac, higher power requirements, better comms.
Government construction has to follow all the regulations, including a bunch specific to the government to fight corruption or waste.
Arguably, the power requirements have been trending downwards since the 90s. Switching teachers and students to laptops instead of chonky desktops almost certainly has made a dent in power consumption. Further better insulation and hvac systems has almost certainly cut down on power costs.
For example, pretty much every school now-a-days has 1 or multiple SROs assigned to their schools. Cops get paid quite well which means throwing an additional $250k+ into everyone's budget.
Every school now has an IT department which practically did not exist in the past. That costs money.
Then there is just general admin bloat that takes an excessive chunk of money out of schools (For example, PR and marketing for public schools... which is a bit ridiculous, but you district almost certainly is employing them).
There are also just general infrastructure bills coming due with construction prices being higher than ever. Schools built in the 70s are often in desperate need of repair/refurbishment.
Corruption may play a role, but I suspect the way it mostly manifests itself is a principle hiring their do-nothing family member in a role they aren't qualified to fill (so they double fill it).
For real, though, it's because we've made it a social taboo for teachers to touch children or to strike back to defend themselves, and the troubled kids whose parents gave them up for emotional adoption to Youtube and Tiktok know this and would nefariously exploit the power imbalance if it were not for the very real and plausible threat of being tackled by a 40%-chance-of-being-a-wife-abuser washed up former highschool football player too stupid to get a bach degree that is legally allowed to execute them without consequence.
I'd also point out that smaller (and or older) female teachers can be overpowered by teen boys.
But using cops as a solution is frankly idiotic. Kids do idiotic shit and bringing down the full force of the law against them is insane. For all the reasons you point out, a cop is the worst possible person to rely on for physical restraint.
SROs tend to be lenient and try not to file charges if possible, or even get involved if it's a minor thing.
From what you're saying, the problem isn't having police in schools. The problem is that the laws can be harsh - for juveniles or adults, in school or elsewhere.
Seems the need for police goes a bit further culturally...
But (assuming that this is a correct claim, which seems plausible but which I don't think I can prove) that IS corruption. What else would you call that? It's people in whom we entrust our public resources funneling them to their friends.
Build schools is expensive because of everything but building the school. Surveying the land. Getting approval for noise and traffic. Ecological impact studies. Permits for everything. Minor plan changes requiring re-approval of everything. Not to mention all the legal parameters and latent threats around every decision.
Yes, corruption flourishes in red tape. But it is not exactly the source of the problem.
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.
I can't tell you if a lot of these designs are architecture wank, or actually seriously informed by literature, although architects do pour over relevant literature if only to post rationalize / sell designs.
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.
Using the facilities 'after-school' is good idea.
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.
I wouldn’t learn what the Lindy effect was until decades later, but looking back, it was an instructive early lesson.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: That said, these schools looks like they could be a good fit for a Sudbury-style school :)
BTW, I went to those horrible school buildings the article talks about, and experienced none of the bad effects claimed.
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.
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.
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.
...and those bastards went out and won World War 2. The end.