School Design Together

Pamela Woolner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317683414
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The time is ripe for interdisciplinary, collaborative approaches to school design. Whatever the current funding limitations, we still need to think about how we design, organise and use space in schools for learning and teaching.

This edited book ensures that we don't start from ground zero in terms of good design. Including chapters from researchers and practitioners in architecture and education, it assesses, describes and illustrates how education and environment can be mutually supportive. The centrality of participation and collaboration between architects, educators and school users holds these diverse contributions together. The book embodies the practice as well as the principle of interdisciplinary working.

Organised in two parts, this volume considers how schools are designed and used with chapters looks at current and past school environments in the UK, US and Europe. It then questions how the learning environment can be improved through participatory design processes with contributors from design and education backgrounds offering both theoretical understanding and practical ideas.

Written without subject-specific jargon or assumptions, it can be used by readers from either an architectural or educational background, bridging the on-going communication gap between education and design professionals.

Design and education professionals alike will appreciate the:

• practical information which shows how to change or improve a learning environment

• focus on evidence-based research

• case studies and chapter topics including schools from across the primary and secondary sectors.

PART 1

The design and use of schools

Preface

Pamela Woolner

What is a school? This is essentially the question which the contributors to the first part of this book address. Their various viewpoints are useful since, as Peter Blundell Jones points out in Chapter 1, it’s hard to see with fresh eyes an institution that we tend to take for granted. Looking sometimes as architects, or sometimes as educationalists, the chapter authors enable us to see the interplay of school design and educational use. Issues of policy and practice reoccur across the chapters, but with differing understandings provided by these complementary perspectives of potential designer or potential educator. This will enable readers from whatever background to look afresh at the practice and space of the school.

A partial solution to our habituation to ‘the school’ is to use what Peter Blundell Jones calls the ‘benefit of hindsight’. In his chapter he looks at the architecture of school buildings across the last two centuries, mainly in the UK, but with some more recent examples of German schools. The wider perspective obtained through considering historic and international examples is also found in other chapters. In Chapter 3, Geraint Franklin considers how the ideals of the post-war school building programme compare to the procurement process, design and results of twenty-first-century school building. Taking a historic view of the practices of schooling, and in particular the use of open plan space in American education, is the starting point for educationalist Neil Gislason in Chapter 5. However, in Chapter 2, Karl Wall encourages us to look again at the primary school through considering the needs and experiences of the diversity of users making up the school community in a typical UK primary school.

Clearly the school as a building is important. In his chapter, Karl Wall reviews how elements of the physical space interact with needs and use to affect learning, but concludes that there are limits to how the available evidence can be used currently to inform design decisions. In fact, many architects and educators aspire for the school space to be a part of learning, although, as Jennifer Singer reminds us in Chapter 4, current school building policy in England appears to see the school building more narrowly as ‘shelter’ for education. Yet in his chapter Peter Blundell Jones argues forcefully for the importance of our spatial experience of buildings and therefore the centrality of the school layout for the young child. He claims that this relates to values, but also to practicalities, as a particular arrangement of space ‘makes some patterns of use easier and others more difficult’. How this plays out in practice is the central concern of Neil Gislason, who presents his research into the educational use of two open plan schools. His argument is that over-arching cultural enthusiasms for particular educational styles and even a school layout to match will be limited without aligning the specific organisation and practices of an individual school. In her chapter, Jennifer Singer also addresses the interplay of the generic and the specific, but here in terms of design: success in school design, she argues, is achieved through reconciling the generic needs with the specifics of the site, and thus designing a school that suits current requirements but will be appropriate into the future.

A concern with the future of school design and use is a common theme through many of the chapters. Often as part of their desire to learn from looking again at the past, many of the contributors also want to distil ideas from recent experiences, and in many cases interdisciplinary understanding is central to their solutions. Geraint Franklin considers some recent primary school designs to inform his conclusions about the design process and, in particular, the need for educators and architects to talk. Jennifer Singer is concerned that the learning about school space resulting from BSF for design professionals might be lost with a change of direction in building policy. Neil Gislason concludes his chapter with a checklist intended for architects and school staff to work through together to create appropriate space and usage.

Although each chapter contributor hails from a background of either education or architecture, and the content and style of their chapters reflect that, they are all aware that schools are both physical spaces and communities of educational and social practices. The relationship of these two aspects of the school are vital for its success and are foundational for developing interdisciplinary understandings of school design. The chapters in this first part make an important contribution to this emerging knowledge base.

1

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SCHOOL BUILDING AND THE ARTICULATION OF TERRITORY

Peter Blundell Jones

One of the most revealing moments in Augustus Welby Pugin’s manifesto True Principles, which launched the Gothic Revival in the 1830s, is his description of Magdalen College, Oxford, presented as an example of ‘propriety’ in building. The lavish bird’s eye view of the complex (Figure 1.1) is accompanied by a description of its various elements, claiming that all were arranged in hierarchical order from the chapel down, each part having ‘its distinguishing character and elevation’, even individual rooms being recognisable from their windows and chimneys. Pugin contrasts this virtuous articulation with an attack on ‘modern collegiate buildings’ that lack it, illustrated by a parody drawing of University College London (Figure 1.2).

FIGURE 1.1 Magdalen College

Source: Pugin 1853.

This, Pugin claims, is

the reverse of all I have been describing… [w]e look in vain for the solemn quadrangle, the studious cloister, the turreted gate-house… [n]ot a ghost of these venerable characteristics…is to be seen, but generally one uniform mass, unbroken either in outline or in face, undistinguishable from other large buildings which surround it. As to its purpose it might be taken for a barrack hospital or a lunatic asylum.

Warming to his theme, Pugin asks rhetorically: ‘How is it possible to expect that the race of men who proceed from these factories of learning will possess the same feelings as those who anciently went forth from the Catholic structures of Oxford and Winchester!’ (Pugin 1853: 42–46).

Implicit in this critique are several ideas. First that buildings should in some way declare their social purpose, and clearly differentiate between one purpose and another. Second, that the subordinate parts of a complex should display a differentiation of internal functions and of their relation to one another. Third, that this differentiation should be legible to an external observer. Pugin does not distinguish between the passing tourist and a regular user of the building, even though plan and organisation are for him the stated starting point. But one might fairly claim that the exterior of Magdalen College is more readable to a student familiar with its internal layout than to a passing farmer on his way to market, and Pugin must have been thinking of the inmates when writing of influences and feelings. So although his bird’s eye view is basically an exterior, it stands also for the internal experience of use and progression through. And if Pugin does not exactly say that one should know whether one is entering the hall or the chapel, he takes it for granted that this matters. Different kinds of room accommodate specific daily rituals, whether they be meals, worship or learning. The rooms become associated with the activities, and by their position, size and decoration we recognise their relative importance.

FIGURE 1.2 ‘Modern collegiate buildings’

Source: Pugin 1853.

We are obliged in using buildings to recognise their spatial order not only with our eyes but with our bodies, if at first only to remember our way out again, but later as a haptic experience tied to the rhythm of our daily lives. Our feet know how many steps there are although we never count them, and we don’t trip when descending the stair in the dark. This kind of body memory may not be consciously understood or valued, but it is retained as part of the background order of things. In other words, building complexes inevitably set up a spatial order of oppositions and adjacencies, of progressions and hierarchies, that frame the life occurring within them. These normally include territories inclusive or exclusive of different groups, whether one’s own classroom, the headmaster’s office or the gendered lavatories. We learn to recognise and respect the thresholds leading into these territories even when they are only minimally marked, and to associate them with particular rules of usage. We also interpret the meaning of the space as we use it and share it with others, and in the process our beliefs and expectations become enmeshed with the patterns of the building. The anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu saw this as the relationship between the habitat and what he called the ‘habitus’, defined as ‘the socially constituted system of cognitive and motivating structures through which the habitat is engaged’. For Bourdieu therefore ‘The house is like a book which children learn to read with the body’ (Bourdieu 1977).

Growing up and entering school, the child exchanges the domestic setting for a larger society, often for the first time, so the building becomes not only a learning instrument in the appropriation of space, but also a more general exemplar of how rules are applied to spaces. An implicit idea of society and its organisation is therefore bound to be carried in any spatial arrangement, whether it be dictatorial, democratic, utilitarian or otherwise. The curriculum, the rule book, the head teacher’s policy, the staff hierarchy, the punishment regime and other socially prescribed matters may appear to exert a far stronger influence on the way a school works, but the spatial setting is nevertheless ever present and never neutral, for it always makes some patterns of use easier and others more difficult. We become blind to this once habituated in the use of a building, for it seems just to be there, and we have to make an imaginative leap to envisage how it might be otherwise.

Historical examples

One of the benefits of hindsight is that it throws into relief patterns of belief and organisation different from those of today, making more evident the link between buildings and society. Pugin’s praise for Magdalen College included a wholehearted approval of its religious foundation and monastic layout, the dominant chapel correctly proclaiming its Christian purpose. And when general education began to develop in the nineteenth century it often began with Sunday schools, though some of the first secular national schools were without obvious claims to faith and supported by subscription. An interesting example is a school in Manchester planned in 1812 (Figure 1.3).

FIGURE 1.3 Manch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on the contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – a school environment to help, not hinder: understanding the role of physical space in education
• Part 1 The design and use of schools
• Part 2 Designing together for change in school
• Index