Evolution of the Design Process ‘from the inside out’1
Early twentieth-century educational experiments, widely recognized as pioneering and popularly labelled as ‘progressive’ created a firm foundation for articulating a vision of post-war educational environments.2 But those who actively promoted a vision of post-war schooling were more concerned to identify existing and emergent ‘good practice’ than to argue from precepts of progressive theory. ‘Progressive’ was a term that by the 1960s had become loosely associated with child-centred education and a form of primary school that resulted directly from the efforts of this group. However accurate or not the term ‘child-centred’, Mary Crowley would not have used it herself and neither would the Medds as a partnership. Rather, she would have identified with others pursuing and furthering excellence in practice which was already found to be flourishing in certain war-time elementary schools across the country.
Designing ‘from the inside out’ was common parlance in architecture influenced by Modernism. In school design it meant that architects had to become as familiar as teachers with the everyday practices of schooling. From this deep and extensive knowledge they would recognize the potential within the built environment for enhancing a new approach to curriculum and pedagogy. This approach emphasized learning through first hand experience, engagement with the creative arts, decision-making, observation, discovery and free expression. The key to communicating with teachers and encouraging them along these lines was to persuade them that their practice naturally led towards an innovative environment even though they might not themselves have envisaged this. But to achieve that end, certain procedures were seen as essential in the design process. These included close observation, planning through drawing, and planning through measurement, together with good organization and a commitment to challenge the hegemony of the conventional classroom. Their approach took considerable time and reflected the fact that the Development Group was operating within the public sphere and certainly could take more time and deeper measures than any contemporary architect in private practice could then or since afford.
EDUCATION OF THE EYE
Tackle the subject through educators and not through architects …just sit in the back, watch, and listen.3
Establishing a rhythm of visiting schools and observing and recording practice, the Medds relied on key HMI to direct them to meet teachers identified as nurturing what were then described as ‘growth points’ in practice. This would indicate that something unusual was occurring at a school as a result of experimentation led by the head teacher or an innovative class teacher, and that something was more often than not concerned with altering arrangements of space, furniture and time.
However, getting out of the office and going around schools to observe practice was not considered unusual at that time. Alec Clegg later recalled the excitement of this period and throughout his career often referred to certain schools where one could observe, in spite of the surroundings and environment, a transformation in educational practice taking place. He had in turn been inspired in this way of promoting educational progress by Christian Schiller whom he described as ‘the most inspired man I have known’.4 Schiller would, ‘go into a school – a drab and dull school perhaps – and he would nose around in it until he found a vestige of work with a spark in it – work that was doing a fire-kindling rather than pot-filling job.’5 He would draw the teacher’s attention to that spark and would encourage both the teacher and others in the school to appreciate the significant conditions that had produced that result. In turn the teacher would be encouraged to engage with their peers to help consolidate and spread good practice. Both Schiller and Clegg were keenly interested in the creative arts and the built environment of schools and so it was no surprise that they connected strongly and effectively with the Medds.
At the same time, local education officers took advice and inspiration from specialist teachers and advisers and the arts were pivotal in this respect. Clegg recalled the excitement of the work and the conversations with advisory staff.6 Education through various art forms was regarded as a key to the curriculum for younger children, laying a foundation for future possibilities in the child’s development. ‘The real discovery we made was that the Art, Music and Movement Advisers were all doing the same thing – inspiring teachers and children, building up confidence and conviction.’7
It cannot be over-estimated how much the arts were considered to be of primary importance during these years. Many educationalists in the UK and abroad were influenced by the publications of Herbert Read, particularly his book Education Through Art, first published in 1943.8 There Read brought a legitimacy to the arts at the centre of the curriculum, through a framework of psychologically based arguments. Significantly, he included as a final chapter an homage to the architects who had collaborated with Henry Morris at Impington in Cambridge where Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry were responsible for the design of a village college.
The first HMI attached to the Development Group was Leonard Gibbon, an educationalist greatly respected by the Medds.9 Gibbon directed them to schools in different parts of the country which they visited and while David made measured plans, Mary would talk with teachers about their intentions, sketch classroom arrangements and observe the activities happening through the day.
Typically, they and other architects from the Development Group and LEAs observed classrooms spilling over with activities where lack of practical space was compensated for by means of improvised use of corridors and cloakrooms. Edith Moorhouse, education adviser in Oxfordshire and a great ally and friend of the Medds, was an important influence in facilitating close observation of schools at this time. In a general survey of Oxfordshire schools, as early as 1947, she wrote,
On visiting a school one usually crosses an inadequately small and rough playground and passes through a small and dismal cloakroom before entering the classroom; one’s first impression on entering the door of the classroom depends a great deal on the teacher and the children within. One can sometimes forget the high windows and dingy classrooms in an atmosphere of pleasantness and lively activity.10
This ultimate faith in good teaching and the freedom of teachers to improvise with the spaces and equipment at their disposal is typical of the approach taken. Lack of space, pressure on resources and a new generation of imaginative teachers – many of whom were relatively new to the profession after having had former careers in commerce or business – combined to make for a vibrant situation in many schools. This generation of teachers inherited a spirited defence of the arts that had implications for the design of space and time in schools where ‘drawing, modeling, craftsmanship of all kinds, writing, singing, playing instruments, composing, rhythmic movement, dancing, drama, cooking, sewing, gardening – provide ways in which men’s (sic) instincts and ideals take shape and inform his delight in colour, sound, pattern movement, shape, texture’.11
Schiller was a mathematician yet saw the arts as the key to achieve deep and lasting learning experiences across the curriculum for children. He was also deeply interested in architecture and followed the work of the Medds over decades, often revisiting the schools they had designed to observe how they were working. As early as May 1946, Schiller set out his ideas on what should be the criteria of a good junior school including ‘that the children are expressing their powers in language, in movement, in music, in painting, in making things – that is to say, as artists’.12 Children making their own worlds and, in so doing understanding it, was a quality that chimed with the notion of designing school ‘from the inside out’. Self-sufficiency, practical engagement and appreciation of beauty were essential characteristics of an education and educational environment.
Some teachers began to follow this advice and school interiors became in many instances more challenging to navigate than had been the case in the past. Architects or inspectors visiting schools to observe practice,
found that they could not use the usual method of analyzing curricula, timetables and circulation. Instead they spent much of their time simply watching teachers and children … Although activities in the schools might at first sight appear unplanned, the team found that they generally proceeded within a carefully conceived framework evolved by the teachers through their own observation of the children.13
6.1 Children painting in a school corridor from ‘Story of a School’, a pamphlet published in 1949 by the Ministry of Education, telling the story of Steward St School, Birmingham. IOE Archives, J/1/1/16
By watching, sketching, analyzing and discussing it was possible gradually to build a foundation of first hand knowledge on which to base new and different school design. In its turn the new design could be used and tested by teachers who would recognize its successes and its failures and be stimulated by those to try out further new ideas, further improvisations. Back again to the architect; to watch, discuss, criticise – and again to try and interpret the requirements of education.14
Such principles were in keeping with attention to particular ways of seeing pupils and teachers and a commitment to recognizing the potential of both as creative beings. This viewpoint was at the time disseminated through a programme of training and professional development courses first at Dartington Hall in Devon and later at Woolley Hall in Yorkshire, organized by HMIs Schiller and Tanner and by Alec Clegg.15
But the new approaches to educating primary school pupils involved changes to time as well as space and use of materials. Key to the transformation beginning to occur was a variety of activities going on at the same time in the same space. As the Medds explained,
Of special interest to the architects … was the great variety of activity – painting on a scale ranging from an exercise book sheet of paper to a large mural; modeling and constructing with a wide variety of tools and materials; carrying out experiments; making music; impromptu acting; quiet reading and writing; listening to stories; arranging collections of interesting objects; looking after plants and pets – all probably going on at the same time and often in a room of little more than 500 sq ft with no sink and hardly any storage space.16
Material things, objects, and curiosities, it was believed, were essential elements to support discovery learning and child-centered teaching. School interiors should therefore be designed to accommodate careful display of materials and objects easily accessible to children. These features would endorse and promote teachers’ awareness that children of all ages were essentially active individuals, able to make choices and decisions as independent, resourceful learners.
There was a strong belief that even the smallest experiments by teachers within schools should be nurtured to influence both their own school and the wider community of schools. Robin Tanner’s intervention in this respect was pervasive. This he achieved by devoting all his time to teachers or schools on whom he knew he would have some effect, while practically ignoring the others.
Leonard Marsh was a student of Schiller, in turn succeeding to Schiller’s role as one of the most progressive teacher trainers, in Marsh’s case at Goldsmiths College in London. Marsh, like Schiller recognized the significance of the built environment and the importance of training the teacher’s eye towards a keener awareness of the visual. He exhorted teachers to ensure that the school building provided countless examples of everyday objects of good design, well-arranged books and other materials, and colours to support a range of work within the building and outside. In one of his books, Marsh adopted the concept of ‘growth points’ in the primary school for a discussion about school furniture. He suggested that ‘teachers will need to be on the look out for examples of craftsman-made furniture such as rocking-chairs and upholstered chairs for a reading corner, or for other special needs within the school. This will do much to preserve the growth points in our schools’.17
This practitioner-led approach to design has sometimes been criticized as being exclusive: the Medds followed the lead of HMI who spotlighted only certain head teachers and particular schools that seemed to be making the kinds of pedagogical changes they admired. It has been contended that as a result the Medd schools were too prescriptive and over-designed, the attention to detail suggesting an over-determined environment for teachers. David acknowledged this point of view but argued that it was not the case. He and Mary and others in the Development Group expected buildings to change through practice and buildings needed to be flexible enough to allow this to happen. Addressing the Architectural Association about the work of the DES Development Group in February 1965, he explained,
It is only by talking to and building for those on the frontier of experience, so to speak, that we can design buildings that challenge our best teachers with opportunities rather than limitations. In the passage of time, these opportunities may became limitations, and the stage is then set for further development…thus the shape of the building changes, and such changes are more important than those brought about by design opinion because they are based on changes in the life and activities for which the buildings provide.18
PLANNING THROUGH DRAWING AND SKETCHING
Mary Crowley’s love of drawing and compulsive application of it when viewing schools was at the heart of the design process she developed within A&BB. The creative spirit that inspired her to capture the world visually was a faculty that certain HMI also encouraged in teachers in order that they might overcome a common adult feeling of incapacity in art, and so that they might come to view human beings of all ages as capable artists. We have seen how on her many visits to schools and nurseries in Scandinavia and Europe, Mary kept a record of her travels in a sketch pad where she drew impressions but also made measured and detailed plans. This method was her architectural theory. She explained the process of design as evolving from sketches at the start of an observation to a building at the finish.
This evolutionary process began with sketches of ideas which emerged from the discussion and observation on the visits and which often formed the record of these visits. A sketch of the disposition of furniture and people at selected moments of the day vividly identifies the way teachers and children mould their surroundings to suit their work. The value of an architect’s first hand experience lies in his appreciation of detail as much as his understanding of trends. A drawing which records the plants growing on the window sills, the corrugated cardboard folded out to form a screen, the settee, rug, low tables and radio, the cooker and American cloth spread over the table, the ingenious display of children’s work, antiques and the original works of contemporary artists, do more to show how different is a classroom today from the classroom of even a few years ago, than do any number of deductions from meetings held around tables.19
Her sketches were then used in turn to stimulate discussion with teachers, cumulative in their effect of encouraging design to flow out of experience rather than be imposed from outside. Cost limits were temporarily put to one side while the various drawings were brought together towards assembling a whole, so as not to obscure the fundamental educational principles.
We have seen how, in her many travels and visits to school sites Mary took particular pains to sketch and so capture in drawing the natural environment of the school or kindergarten setting. These were for her not incidental aesthetic details in a landscape but rather an essential educational component. Thus already in Building Bulletin 1, ‘New Primary Schools’ published in 1949, we read of the importance of ‘planting and garden design’ not as an appendix but as a central aspect of the general space requirements. Mary was aware that such an emphasis on the educational benefits of landscaping would have been read with scepticism by those planning for restricted urban sites, but her purpose was to encourage more thought and persuade teachers and architects to act in collaboration on this advice.
It must be remembered how important the garden treatment of a school site is as an educational factor. The question has to be asked: ‘Is this a place in which children can enjoy themselves?’ Children should be surrounded by trees and plants, not by asphalt only; their interest will quickly be aroused if they are encouraged to learn about and care for the garden. A plan of the whole school and garden might be exhibited, with the names of the trees, shrubs and flowers to which the children could add their own records of planting.20
Mary, accompanied by David, attended many of the in-service training courses for primary school teachers organized by the Ministry of Education during the 1960s at Dartington Hall in Devon. The inspiration for these courses came from the educator and artist Robin Tanner, supported by Christian Schiller. Tanner had first met the Medds in 1955 during the development of Woodside school at Amersham and Finmere school in Oxfordshire. Tanner recognized, at Amersham, the potential of a fundamental change with respect to how teachers might view their work.