21st Century School Design

From Flux..

“Why do schools look the way they do? Why is there a chasm between widely acknowledged best practice principles and the actual design of a majority of school facilities? Why has the disconnect between learning research and learning places been so difficult to repair?”

"These  are some of the questions posed by American architects Prakash Nair and Randall Fielding – who call themselves both School Architects and ‘Change Agents for Education’. Nair and Fielding’s take on the built environment is that it’s not only the place of learning but also ‘the psyche of learning’, impacting people’s emotions, relationships and behaviours and ultimately the teaching and learning methods that are employed.

"Nair and Fielding feel that one of the biggest barriers to innovation in school design is the lack of a common design vocabulary that all school stakeholders can share. They’ve developed an approach and a resultant book called The  Language of School Design: Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools."

The school of the 21st century might be composed of various designs to meet specific needs. The authors listed 3 example terms that help identify the concept.

• Cave Space –       places for individual study, reflection and quiet reading
• Watering Hole       Space – places to learn from peers
• Campfire Space       – places to learn from experts and storytellers

Working at a school site that is over 50 years old has created some interesting problems. The layout, design, and infrastructure are simply not able to meet the needs of the 21st century education.

I was intrigued by this article on the Economist website. It seems that architecture is going through a change to meet the demands and needs of the 21st century.

“The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is ‘a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces’ such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously ‘a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces’”.

Could you imagine a school campus that looks like this?

“FRANK GEHRY, a celebrity architect, likes to cause aesthetic controversy, and his Stata Centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did the trick. Opened in 2004 and housing MIT’s computer-science and philosophy departments behind its façade of bizarre angles and windows, it has become a new Cambridge landmark. But the building’s most radical innovation is on the inside. The entire structure was conceived with the nomadic lifestyles of modern students and faculty in mind. Stata, says William Mitchell, a professor of architecture and computer science at MIT who worked with Mr Gehry on the centre’s design, was conceived as a new kind of ‘hybrid space’”.

“This is best seen in the building’s ’student street’, an interior passage that twists and meanders through the complex and is open to the public 24 hours a day. It is dotted with nooks and crannies. Cafés and lounges are interspersed with work desks and whiteboards, and there is free Wi-Fi everywhere. Students, teachers and visitors are cramming for exams, flirting, napping, instant-messaging, researching, reading and discussing. No part of the student street is physically specialised for any of these activities. Instead, every bit of it can instantaneously become the venue for a seminar, a snack or romance.”

I can hear directors of Maintenance and Operations groaning now. I am sure janitors across the country are reaching for the Excedrin. Principals are readying for the ulcer from all the worry that this architecture design will create. Or, maybe, we could see past the potential problems and embrace the potential benefits of the architecture of our schools meeting the needs of the flexible, cooperative, collaborative, tech-savvy students of the 21st century.