School terms - designing educational buildings

Architectural Review, The, June, 1996 by Peter Davey

Educational buildings are crucially important in everybody's development. They are the scenes on which some of the most critical passages of our lives are played out - hence the vital necessity of making them as webs of places.

Education takes almost all of us out of our families for the first time. We move from the home to general society through schools: we change from adolescence to adulthood at college. So the buildings in which we are educated have very special importance in everyone's lives. Can you ever recover from your first classrooms? Can you forget your first days in an educational institution: lonely, unsure, excited, dazed by the strange mixture of new people, ideas and influences.

Not the least influence on the forming mind is the nature of the places in which the wonderful, sometimes terrifying and often absurd processes of education take place. The nineteenth-century British and Prussians who first realised the economic importance of universal education naturally modelled the forms of their schools for the masses on the pattern of the barracks and the prison: disciplinarian places that could be produced moderately cheaply, where the newly educated could be drilled into acceptance of the values of the state and the ruling class. The great late nine-teenth-century four-storey schools with their classrooms double banked along pitiless central corridors, Sherlock Holmes' 'lighthouses' of knowledge for the poor, still dominate the parts of the inner cityscape of London, Paris and Berlin: they are as much part of the struggle between the European powers as the dreadnought and the gatling gun.

Gradually, after the First World War, and increasingly after the Second, the pattern of school building changed. There was huge pressure to build more and more schools (and in the 1960s universities) for populations that were becoming increasingly prosperous and geographically disseminated. At the same time, changes in educational theory and practice altered emphasis from drill and rote-work to a proposal that every student should be encouraged to realise his or her worth within a generous and liberal egalitarian programme: people were to become citizens not subjects of authoritarian states and classes. The schools produced by the Californian SCSD (School Construction Systems Development)(1) and in England by CLASP(2) were models for a Modernist democracy: full of light, multivalent space; relatively cheap to produce using technologies and management systems that had been perfected during the war.(3) They were in many ways the exact opposite of the authoritarian Victorian models, and an extraordinarily brave attempt to found a new society based on equity and decency.

That the results of the experiment have not been successful is mainly due to the change in morality that we have experienced in the last 20 years, when greed and selfishness have been held to be the prime motivators of humanity, and that there is no such thing as society. But it must be admitted that the shortcomings of the postwar system (and the buildings) were partly related to the hubris of the professions involved: both teachers and architects believed that they could forge a new way of living, a new society that would be squeaky-clean and free of original sin. It was a proposal that was bound to fail: humanity can't be changed so fast and with so little concensus.

We now look back on the great mid-century school and university building programmes as a triumph of quantity over quality. And a victory of professional values over those of the general public. These judgements are of course clouded by the natural rejection of the work of predecessors that every generation has. When a cultural audit of the twentieth century is drawn up, it will surely be seen that, for all the problems, the large-scale provision of educational buildings in the '60s and '70s was one of the nobler enterprises of the period. But the price of so much production was loss of specificity: a displacedness.

Yet one of the most important qualities of education (and educational buildings) is the provision of fixed points. To function properly in later life, everyone has to acquire the basic rules of grammar and mathematics, and at least a sketch of history. Almost as important are the three-dimensional surroundings in which the lessons are learned. From Plato in his garden[4] onwards, good educationalists have always understood the importance of place. In the best educational buildings, as in the best education, there must be a balance between overall discipline and particular event.

In very different ways, the buildings shown in this issue all embody this strategy. Zvi Hecker's school in Berlin (p36) brilliantly exploits the potential of its powerful figure to create a network of very particular places within the reassurance of a clear discipline. The little art school at Kankaanpaa in Finland (p74) is completely different, but shares the same approach: a new town square has been created, with the school forming a semi-public space off it, a place defined by walls of rooms, each of which has a very particular character. Perhaps the most daring of the buildings shown here is the Temasek Polytechnic in Singapore by James Stirling, Michael Wilford & Partners (p48). It is a big complex, designed to cater for thousands of people. It will undoubtedly be featured in architectural magazines round the world, and its Constructivist precedents will be discussed at great length. Yet its great virtue is that it provides a network of particular, individual places linked within the mesh of its very strong overall parti.