Towards the ‘Future-building school’. Lasting Legacies of Design and Democratic Practice
It must be a place which permits the joy in the small things of life and in democratic living.1
It has to do with stewardship. And before stewardship you have to have a great design, so that all of this can happen.2
Many of the schools designed by Mary Crowley and her contemporaries in Europe and the USA in the middle decades of the twentieth century are still in use and have been formally recognized as of architectural or historical significance. This recognition takes different forms in different countries but having explored the subject through relationships to this one life we can see common ground between these schools. Most if not all are schools for the general population – in the UK known as state schools, in the USA known as public schools – designed at a time when post-war governments in general, in spite of severe economic and material shortages, increased their commitment to the building or renewal of democracies through public schooling. Many are regarded as significant less for their exterior appearance than for the interior arrangements including furniture, fixtures, fittings and decoration. They have in common a building design that originally was rooted in a view of the child as an individual with complex needs that needed to be met to support the fulfillment of growth and development. The approach to education taken by these schools was progressive or child-centered. Since they have been operating, the extent to which their educational agendas might have been maintained or lost has depended entirely on the teachers who inhabited their spaces, especially the head teachers. But those teachers have been subject to enormous pressures both demographic and political.
Over the last two decades, across Western democracies, neo-liberal agendas have had the effect of increasing pressures on schools, teachers and pupils to perform and to compete with one another. Along with this a corresponding view of the child has emerged, less concerned with their readiness for learning than preparation for earning. An economic value system has largely replaced the philosophical and educational agendas familiar to Mary Crowley and her contemporaries. At a time when that same economic value system is coming under increasing scrutiny it is a valid question to ask how well these schools are equipped to meet current and future educational needs and in what ways they might undergo re-design to strengthen their value and prolong their life.
Going forward, it is more likely that new schools will be reconfigured from the old rather than complete new buildings constructed, as global economies come under increasing pressure to provide public schooling from limited resources. Architects across the world are operating globally under respective conditions of procurement that are very different from those experienced by Mary Crowley and her contemporaries. Neo-liberal agendas of a succession of governments have brought an end to the kind of centralized planning and guidance that was generated in the past. However the economic conditions for the foreseeable future are not dissimilar to those of the post war period when shortages of materials and capital forced educators to improvise and architects to invent. For these reasons it is likely that new schools will be developed from existing buildings some of which might have served non educational functions and some of which may have long histories as schools.
In the recent past, so called iconic buildings designed by architects with a global name and influence, complete with atriums and striking unusual forms in the landscape have been supported by governments eager to evidence their commitment to education. For example, in 2010 the Evelyn Grace Academy in London was opened, the first school building designed by the acclaimed architect Zaha Hadid.3 The school received a great deal of attention from the press because of the architect’s status and the unusual appearance of the building but the match between architecture and education is not its strongest point. Critics have observed, ‘in places it looks like a standard gridded building to which exotic geometries have been cosmetically applied’, and the approach to pedagogy resembles nineteenth century styles in its emphasis on discipline, uniformity, order and standards which begs the question – is this a school fit for the twenty-first century? This reminds us of Mary Crowley’s dictum that schools should never become the playthings of architects or governments. What is missing is any evidence of the dedication of the architect to understanding the growth points of education and to study best practice in schools today to design for the future.
While many more Academies will be built, the showcase Academy is from an era that had passed away by 2011, of sponsorship of public schooling via large capital investments, less concerned with long term educational efficiency than short term impact. Such initiatives are not repeatable for hundreds of new schools.4 A more sustainable approach for the future is likely to be less concerned with short term cosmetic appeal than with permitting greater opportunities for reinvention through the engagement of users in the re-creation and sustenance of their environments over time. A step towards this might be in users of buildings, teachers and pupils alike, coming to understand the built environment as a result of a series of decisions and choices about their lives that others have made. The UK Schools Council’s Art and the Built Environment project of the late 1970s, on which Mary Crowley served as an advisor, could be re-invented in the present to support user engagement and participation in school design. All this is important in defending and developing democracies if we are to see schools, as John Dewey did, as builders and re-inventors of democracy generation after generation.
The present generation of teachers, pupils and parents are not necessarily aware of the significance of the design features they encounter in school buildings yet their views are being sought over any aspect of renewal or redesign. Teachers expect to find something familiar from their own experience of education and training and they tend to accept the environment and work with what they have got as efficiently as possible. Architects often consciously or unconsciously refer to their own memories of school in planning and, with the exception of those who specialize in educational buildings, have little knowledge of the history of the relationship between education and architecture that Mary Crowley’s life story illuminates.5 This is the case not only in the UK and Europe but also in the USA and beyond. For that reason, this book hopes to have shed some light on the extent to which these schools were often the result of very considered planning not only to provide shelter but also to promote certain educational principles and values according to a particular view of the child in its development. Some schools have under enlightened leadership adopted a policy of drawing attention to the way that the school building was intended to work as ‘philosophy in brick’ such as at Crow Island school, Winnetka, USA where the school community has assembled a permanent display about the history of the design of the school.
TOWARDS THE ‘FUTURE-BUILDING SCHOOL’
In her book, Learning Futures,6 the educationalist and futurologist Keri Facer takes us on a journey to ‘the future-building school of 2035’,7 within a narrative that explores some familiar territory amidst features and affordances that new technologies will by that time have enabled. In this scenario of the future, we inevitably notice the new, the innovative, the fantastic, but also apparent are the contexts, characteristics, principles and values that have survived as important signifiers of school. As well as changes we see consistencies that are powerfully still present. Evident are characteristics that realize the relationship between education and architecture in ways familiar since at least the beginning of the twentieth century. Since learning can already happen anyplace and anytime it may be surprising to find that there is still a place and a building called ‘school’. But indeed there is and we discover a building strongly connected to the local community in rich and complex ways – some via the architecture and some via the curriculum.
In the 2035 school, the building’s walls are decorated to one side with a digital mural and to the other with greenery, producing food for the cafe: the pupils are producing art and food as part of their curriculum. Courtyards feature in the design of the school; one semi-public space leads to offices on one side, a museum on the other while social and cooperative enterprises, a cafe and small businesses bring the community close to the learning spaces. At the heart of the school is an inner garden-courtyard and around this on several floors are tiered workshops, labs, studios and study spaces – a whole variety of rooms, each one distinctively different from the next by means of size, shape, colour or decoration. There are home rooms on the ground floor where the youngest children gather at the start of the day, with easy access to the outdoor garden courtyard. There are design features that signify to the onlooker that this is a public place of inclusive intergenerational education and while each school might be different, certain characteristics are present in all schools. This includes a museum which is always different, reflecting the locality but in every school museum there is a corner dedicated to ‘the museum of uninteresting objects’ wholly curated by the pupils who are challenged to bring in an object with no interest at all, finding on the way all sorts of interesting features. The place therefore embraces locality, ownership through construction and a rich and growing democracy. Here we find a combination of high-level and low-level technologies and spaces that are flexible enough to support both.8 The wealth of human experience and potential not yet subject to digitization has value here and is afforded space within which it might be allowed to flourish.
Facer makes the point that the seeds of this 2035 school are already present in schools operating today and we need therefore to identify what these are and nurture them carefully and positively.9 Having explored the life of Mary Crowley and the influences on her educational planning and design we have demonstrated that the vision of school set out by Facer has been long struggled for and it is not an easy task to achieve. Mary and David Medd, who travelled so extensively in their lives visiting and advising about school design all over the world would have relished the opportunity to visit Facers’s school of the future primarily because it expresses so much of what they had always valued and believed was important. But the history of education and related government policies remind us of a tendency for schools to revert to the traditional model of education.10 Indeed, the reaction of one reviewer of Facer’s book who read the 2035 school as ‘a cross between Summerhill and California’s High Tech High’ betrays an ignorance of the history of curriculum innovation in relation to school design in the public sector that this book has attempted to counter.11 I suggest that to strengthen the possibilities of Facer’s vision of future schooling, we need to better understand our history as well as strengthen possibilities of participation and unite past practices with contemporary children’s voices.
REVIVING MARY CROWLEY’S FIVE ‘INGREDIENTS OF DESIGN’
As we have seen, by the 1960s Mary Crowley was confidently asserting the necessity of her five ingredients of design in school planning. She extended this to the planning of environments for the under fives in retirement during the 1970s. As a reminder, for schools these ingredients included: a home base; an enclosed room; a general work area; specialist bays; and a veranda or covered area. As much educational as architectural elements, these would in the hands of ‘good’ teachers enable the best practice in teaching to flourish. In any case, here we need to ask how relevant today are Mary Crowley’s ingredients of design in providing an educational environment fit for changing teaching and learning styles? How have they fared in practice and what additional ingredients of design are today powerfully shaping present and future relationships of education and architecture?
In reviewing the literature on modern school buildings and the planning of innovative schools, architectural psychologist Rotraut Walden has identified agreement that the following factors are agreed as necessary; ‘spaces that adapt well to various teaching and learning styles such as hands-on project-based learning, team teaching, presentations, and small group instruction, through open and closed plan classrooms and quiet rooms’.12 In his outline of design themes for the modern school, reviewed by Hille in 2011, an almost identical summary is identified, namely the need to design for school identity, community, variety of learning venues, student and teacher interaction, flexibility and adaptability, quality and comfort in the learning environment.13 Other commentators have noted the emerging ‘educational direction’ in the planning of new schools over the past two decades as to make schools look and feel more like homes. ‘The use of terminology such as house plans and neighbourhood plans by architects reinforces this trend’.14 In London, the purpose built UCL Academy has challenged the hegemony of the classroom with the concept of ‘superstudios’ – large teaching areas which have been specifically designed to provide the best possible facilities for students to use for: classroom group learning; project-based work and pair work; work in small and large groups; individual, independent study; discussions and presentations.15 This built in variety is what the Medds would have recognized as supporting best practice. Evidently there are many parallels between the discourses of past and present in designing new schools. However, there are important differences to be pointed out.
A vital element for the Medds in their planning was to avoid so much flexibility as to remove any suggestion of what might happen in any given space and end up with characterless open plan. Today there is a reluctance to prescribe what should happen in any school space outside of the functions of science labs and home economics. The Medds would have argued for the continuation of a degree of prescription for several reasons. First, they would have argued that while societies always change, children are always children and have the same basic requirements in any time or place and therefore their findings are still relevant. Second, teachers need to be reminded that schools are places primarily for children and only secondly for adults. Third, and most importantly they would have recognized that too much flexibility and openness results in environments that offer teachers the opportunity to re-establish the traditional classroom for reasons stemming from the pressure they are under to produce results. What was needed was not open plan but a ‘planned environment of opportunities’.16
As we have seen, Mary developed her design ingredients from careful observation of teachers and children in schools and by drawing on a legacy of progressive educational practice. Her confidence in their role in making schools fit the child and enabling a ‘good’ teacher to develop the growing points of education was nurtured over time through relationships with HMI and CEOs committed to a view of children as a creative and active agents in their own learning. For a short period of time in Hertfordshire, an additional ingredient was insisted upon by the CEO, John Newsom who in 1949 persuaded the Education Committee to require that one third of one per cent of school building budgets to be spent on art in the form of sculptures or murals.17
In spite of this attitude, pupils themselves were not consulted in the development of the schools designed at Hertfordshire in the 1940s nor by the Ministry of Education (DES) thereafter. It was believed that children ‘spoke’ through their observed actions and behaviours discernible to the trained adult eye.18 To this extent, their changing needs were regarded as essential to come to know and understand. As Christian Schiller asserted, ‘The clients are the children who come to school to learn. Observation of their changing needs can have a radical effect on established concepts of school design.’19 In the USA, there was a similar concern to engage with pupils’ needs. As we have seen, in the design of Crow Island School (1940), children as well as their teachers were thoroughly consulted about their ideal school environment.20
The terms of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1948) determined that children should be protected and cared for and given the means requisite for their normal development, materially, morally and spiritually. This was the context in which the Medds and their contemporaries were working. Significantly, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) ratified in 1990 by all countries except the USA and Somalia, included the recognition that children have the right to be consulted on matters of concern to their lives including their education. Over subsequent decades there has followed across the world a greater interest in bringing into play the views of children about all aspects of their education. There has been much consultation and some direct involvement of children and young people through participative design activities.21 But it is rare for children and young people to be encouraged to express their views about school as a whole and rarer still to be listened to.
In 2001, The Guardian newspaper hosted a competition inviting children in the UK of school age to suggest ways that school might be changed to become the school they would like. This resulted in the ‘Children’s Manifesto’ published by The Guardian and a book, The School I’d Like. Children and Young People’s Reflections on an Education for the 21st Century. Children between the ages of 4 and 18 in 2001 declared that the following features, characteristics, principles and values were important in twenty-first century educational environments. Here they are in summary:
The school we’d like is:
A beautiful school with glass dome roofs to let in the light, uncluttered classrooms and brightly coloured walls.
A safe school with swipe cards for the school gate, anti-bully alarms, first aid classes, and someone to talk to about our problems.
A listening school with children on the governing body, class representatives and the chance to vote for the teachers.
A flexible school without rigid timetables or exams, without compulsory homework, without a one-size-fits-all curriculum, so we can follow our own interests and spend more time on what we enjoy.
A relevant school where we learn through experience, experiments and exploration, with trips to historic sites and teachers who have practical experience of what they teach.
A respectful school where we are not treated as empty vessels to be filled with information, where teachers treat us as individuals, where children and adults can talk freely to each other, and our opinion matters.
A school without walls so we can go outside to learn, with animals to look after and wild gardens to explore.
A school for everybody with boys and girls from all backgrounds and abilities, with no grading, so we don’t compete against each other, but just do our best.22
Ten years on, in a similar exercise, The Guardian newspaper once again invited children and young people to have their say on the school they would like.23 The idea was to see what had changed in children’s views after a decade of government policies to ‘transform’ education through a school renewal and building programme with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) at its core.24 But in reviewing this more recent collection of ideas, suggestions and requests, it soon became evident that very little had changed in pupils’ priorities. While there were certainly suggestions of using digitized platforms and materials in more innovative ways than perhaps teachers were yet able to imagine, what remained consistent was a desire for more ‘real’ learning opportunities that could not be contained within the classroom or by any piece of digital equipment. There is also evidence that children and young people seek a physically more active engagement in learning in comfortable environments that respect their emotional and developmental needs. Indeed, there were many parallels and consistencies with how children and young people had responded in 2001 and with what secondary school age children had suggested in a similar activity carried out in 1969.25
The more recent 2011 ‘Children’s Manifesto’ summarized the ideas drawn from children who offered their suggestions in this second national survey. These ideas evidenced a desire to integrate into their school experiences the practice of caring for each other, for teachers and for other live creatures, for gardens and basic husbandry such as keeping livestock including horses and sheep in school playgrounds. These are practices and experiences that are less academic, resist digitization and to a large degree involve first-hand experience.
In 2011 pupils wanted schools to be,
Active – with lots of different sports, including judo, dance, karate, football and abseiling, and a swimming pool with slides. Playgrounds with climbing frames and tree-houses where you could learn about nature.
Calm – with a chill-out room; music instead of bells, and a quiet place inside at playtime for drawing, reading and board games.
Comfortable – with beanbags, big enough chairs, small enough chairs, slippers, and somewhere personal to store things. There should be cold drinks in the summer and hot drinks to warm you up in winter.
Creative and colourful – with lots of room to make and display art, bright painted walls in corridors and dining rooms, and flowers in the classroom.
Expert – with teachers who don’t just read up about their subjects, but live them, and visiting celebrities to talk about what they do.
Flexible – with more time for favourite subjects, no compulsory subjects apart from maths and English, and more time for art and sport.
Friendly – with kind teachers who speak softly and don’t shout, and special members of staff that you can go and talk to. You should be allowed to sit with your friends in class and assembly.
Listening – with forums for classes to express their views and also chances for pupils to have quiet chats with teachers. Don’t just listen, but take children’s comments seriously and make changes as a result.
Inclusive – with pupils of all achievement, ability and background learning together. Everybody should learn in one room, with opportunities for small group or private work.
International – with food from all over the world on the dinner menu and pupils from all over the world in the classroom; with opportunities to go abroad to learn languages and about other cultures.
Outside – fortnightly school trips (without worksheets), animals to look after like chickens, sheep and horses, and greenhouses to grow fruit and vegetables to eat at school and sell to raise funds.
Technological – with iPads to read and work on, MP3 players for relaxing during breaks or to help concentrate while working alone, and usb sticks to take work home (and save paper).26
In both the 2001 and 2011 surveys (also the Australian surveys in 2005) the built environment, including the outside spaces of school, has been a major concern of pupils and many called for a mixture of comfort, safety and adventure. Children and young people were also able to articulate clearly the relationship between material conditions and attitudes, values and behaviours. If we take Mary Crowley’s planning ingredients and bring them into play with the suggestions of children and young people expressed consistently over the past decade, we can see some strong correlations. The ‘home bases’ meet the needs of children for a ‘friendly’ space where there is a strong sense of belonging and pastoral care which they might help to decorate or furnish to make it their own and where their bodies’ comfort is respected through attention to scale – there are ‘big enough chairs (and) small enough chairs’. ‘Withdrawal spaces’ within enclosed rooms of various sizes meet the needs of children today who describe their need in school buildings for a place of ‘quiet’ or ‘calm’. Bays for specialized activities and general work areas meet the need for children to learn together with space enough to build models, carry out experiments and engaging all of their senses, enjoy ‘lots of room to make and display art’. Finally, Mary’s planning emphasized the importance of learning outside of the classroom and encourage designers and teachers to facilitate access to rich living environments within the school grounds. During the past, these covered spaces would typically house hutches containing various animals for school children to care for. They would contain rich reservoirs of nature through easily accessible ponds surrounded by shrubs and trees. This ingredient directly meets the needs of children today who ask for more opportunities for ‘animals to look after like chickens, sheep and horses, and greenhouses to grow fruit and vegetables to eat at school and sell to raise funds’.27 Such environments enable learning to happen in informal settings as well as providing rich natural environments for children’s play.
There is a close match between Mary Crowley’s planning ingredients and the needs of children who, through their remarks, drawings, plans and models recognize what is anachronistic about current institutional regimes and through their sober and sensible suggestions present a challenge for teachers and architects to collaborate in bringing about a school fit for the twenty-first century.
SCHOOLS FIT FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: FROM THE OLD TO THE NEW
Over the decades since Mary Crowley’s retirement from public work, new factors have arisen that have a direct bearing on the design of schools. For example, even though in the past the Medds were concerned to meet the needs of children in all of their many differences and variations, at that time, in the main, children with physical challenges or who were identified as having learning difficulties were either looked after in institutions outside of the mainstream or simply left undiagnosed. By the mid-1970s, as a result of changes in social attitudes and related legislation architects and educators had to be aware of an even wider variation in the school population. For example, Mary Crowley, now in retirement, included in her 1976 summary requirements for the provision of buildings for the under fives design factors meeting the needs of ‘the handicapped child’.28
Today, public schools are required to be inclusive educational environments with a full range of possible differences amongst the school community. They need to operate with many more specialist services and members of staff who all require space for their business and to store equipment. Multi-storey schools built in the past were unlikely to have lifts and these are required to be installed today. Access to all areas of the the single-storey schools that formed the majority of the early schools designed by Hertfordshire County Council and the Ministry of Education is necessary for wheelchair users. Many of these schools were, as we have seen, equipped with wide corridors intended to be used for informal and small group learning and therefore can meet the needs of wheelchair users with little difficulty.
All users, whatever their physical capabilities or challenges need to feel safe and secure in schools that are well-equipped with high and low technologies that support learning. But how have interpretations of these factors altered over time and been met by those in stewardship of long-standing schools or those charged with their redesign?
FLEXIBILITY AND VARIETY OF SITUATIONS
It is widely acknowledged that schools designed today must achieve a high degree of flexibility to respond to rapid developments in the production of innovative technologies supporting teaching and learning. This was the kind of flexibility and inbuilt variety that the Medds were arguing for half a century ago. After reviewing Munkgaardsskolen by Arne Jacobsen in their visit to Denmark in 1954 they strongly indicated how in spite of elements of design that had clearly learned from best practice elsewhere, there was too much formulaic reliance on the classroom unit. Jacobsen’s school, like many of the Medds’ schools, has since been recognized as being of special architectural interest and its renewal is thus made more challenging. It is interesting, then, to see how this school has been subject to re-design in recent years taking forward the contemporary determination of the Danes to introduce the potential for more flexible learning opportunities in their schools for young children.
9.1 Light cubes. New extension Munkgaardsskolen, Copenhagen, 2011. Architect Dorte Mandrup. Photograph courtesy Adam Mørk
The original school building was designed and constructed between 1948 and 1956, protected in 1995 and assigned since as one of Jacobsen’s masterpieces. The school has operated constantly over these years serving generations of children and their families in this northern suburb of Copenhagen and the fabric and original design has stood the test of time. As we have noted, when they visited Munkgaardsskolen the Medds rather quickly dismissed the overall design as too formal and rigid but they were commenting during the planning and early construction stages. Jacobsen designed furniture and fittings for the school including individual desks and chairs and it was the latter that suggested a rather rigid pedagogy unlike the easily moveable tables and chairs that supported group work that the Medds preferred. It was their arrangements in individual units set in lines facing the teacher in classrooms that the Medds found to be educationally disappointing.
Today, the school has expanded not only to give more capacity but also to offer more flexibility in teaching and learning settings. The arrangement of individual classrooms with their own toilets and direct access to individual courtyards, all scaled to the young child continues to work well. However, the Danes are committed to a more open and flexible way of teaching and learning and for that, the traditional classroom, just as the Medds suggested, does not serve so well.
9.2 Munkgaardsskolen library renovation. Architect Dorte Mandrup. Photograph courtesy Adam Mørk
9.3 Munkgaard-sskolen washrooms utilizing an original fabric design by Arne Jacobsen. Architect Dorte Mandrup. Photograph courtesy Adam Mørk
In 2009 the school has been expanded partly to give more capacity but largely for pedagogical reasons. The firm responsible for the redesign is Dorte Mandrup Architects. The extended school has been developed by creating a new suite of rooms under the existing playground. They are visible from the playground through light cubes that arise at the surface and allow a view from above. An expansive set of interconnected spaces have been conceived as learning environments to support interdisciplinary teaching and learning. This includes a large flight of stairs leading to a conventional staircase out of the basement, constructed in white painted wood.
Parts of these spaces suggest certain activities: there is an area equipped for domestic science. Some soft furnishing suggests sitting with friends or alone. Odd pieces of brightly-coloured furniture suggest collective activities: their plastic coverings already showing signs of wear and tear. The focal point is a dramatic set of four glass boxes, whose diagonal lines suggest crystals, into which children can peer from above in the outside playground over a protective railing into the world below.
The original Jacobsen hall has been redesigned as a new library with some interesting features. It has been furnished with a staircase, reminiscent of Herzberger schools in Amsterdam and the more well known Hellerup school, a short distance away. It is transparent and made from a kind of translucent white plastic material. This is a space for sitting with friends. The library is carpeted in a warm green and cleverly furnished with welcoming wooden pods where a child can sit alone or with friends. A lid closes the ‘door’ to the pod. Large bookshelves spin around and brightly-coloured circular soft furnishings combine with the carpet to create a welcoming soft interior. The old and new design come together as Jacobsen’s small pupil desks and chairs seem not out of place in colour or design. Most of these have been auctioned off but a few remain. Other features have been maintained and preserved such as Jacobsen’s own design of door handles – another detail that brings him into close relation with the Medds. A set of new toilets have been provided in the extended school. Here there is no distinction of gender and the walls, floors and doors are decorated with one of Jacobsen’s fabric designs from 1942–1943.29
In general, the new underground learning space is exciting but somehow its lack of prescription returns it to the institutional, in spite of its opposite intentions. Perhaps it is the bright white interior only punctuated here and there with the scant furnishings that make for a clinical character?
A SENSE OF SAFETY AND BELONGING
Above all perhaps, a school can offer security and love to children (and maybe parents too) in an unkind world.30
The child’s sense of security is helped by making the schoolroom and the whole atmosphere childlike, homey, beautiful.31
Looking ahead, there is now and will continue to be a radically different interpretation of security and safety as compared with the decades when Mary Crowley and her contemporaries were designing schools. Legally enforceable liabilities now seriously impinge not only on the material environment but also on pedagogy. Perhaps this is most evident in the playground or school yard. Ponds were never considered as merely decorative in the past but were to be used for exploration and for play. Today, while their uses for learning have in many cases been preserved, often they have been closed or netted over so as to make it impossible for children to freely play in or around the water. But this is not always the case. An exception is found in a recently built school in Copenhagen with a curriculum specialization in science. This is Utterslev skole designed by KHR AS arkitekter, between 2002 and 2005. The landscape architects are Peter Holst Arkitektur & Landskab. Here, not a pond but a substantial canal has been set in the full length of the playground, planted up with plants that host a wealth of wildlife. When visiting the school, children of primary school age were observed to be taking the opportunity of morning break to dip their hands and sticks into the weedy water to see what they could discover from one of the several wooden dipping platforms provided.
The Medds warned of the dangers of increasing over-protection of school children in their 1971 article ‘Designing Primary Schools’ where they argued,
Education needs to resist the pressures of the engineers of interior space who would have our buildings offer all protection and no connection. The buzz of the fan, the hum and flicker of the fluorescent light are no compensation for the sound of the wind, or the flickers of passing light and shade.32
Perhaps less obvious is how such legislation has impacted on matters concerning scale. For example, it is much more difficult today than it was in the past for windows, door handles, light switches and other equipment to be scaled to the reach of the child.
A characteristic of the primary school designs of the 1940s to 1960s was a particular emphasis on the security of the child interpreted as its sense of belonging and attachment to school. This was to be encouraged by the homeliness and comfort of its environment and the warmth of relationships with its teachers. It could be argued that Mary Crowley led in this direction, drawing from her observations of practice an holistic view of childhood inherited from her father and from connections with the trans-Atlantic progressive movement for education that was at that time seeking opportunities to shift its emphasis from the private or independent sectors to serve public or state provision. She drew inspiration from Carlton Washburne who recognized this as an important factor as early as in 1940.
One very simple way in which the school can contribute to the child’s security is to make the school surroundings homelike and attractive … colour, soft furnishings, plants and flowers in the classroom help. So do moveable seats and informal arrangements and … access to a satisfying social environment.33
In the common vocabulary of design that was generated by educationalists and architects at the time when Eveline Lowe primary school first opened its doors for operation (1966) security was a term that was often used.
Above all, perhaps, a school can offer security and love to children (and maybe to parents too) in an unkind world … Security, with the need to withdraw into privacy, on the one hand, and on the other, independence, with the need to share and explore, are perhaps two sides of a coin, and come close to the root of school design.34
The ‘informal coming and going inside and outside of the school’ was celebrated as a sign that the child was secure in its own self reliance and able to practice self-direction. And as we have seen, architects were intent on addressing a child’s security by making the school surroundings homelike and attractive.35 The original Eveline Lowe School was designed to encourage parents to enter the school and stay for as long as they wished. The Plowden Report (1967) argued strongly that primary schools should develop stronger connections with the community. In design terms, this ease of access was indicated in the low railings and direct entry to the learning area from the main school entrance. The documentary film about Eveline Lowe School, made by the BBC and broadcast in 1969, featured parents walking straight in to the teaching areas and celebrated this as an aspect of modern primary education.
Like Munkegaard School, Eveline Lowe School has recently been subject to a redesign where a somewhat different interpretation of security is evident even if the original interpretation still operates. A completely sealed unit separates visitors – be they parents or others – from the inside of the school. This acts as a kind of holding bay from which by means of securely locked password protected doors, entry may be gained. What has changed? Teachers and policy makers still argue the importance of parental involvement in schools and for the buildings to be used by the community in out of school hours. But the interpretation of security has lost its association with a strong sense of belonging and become one more associated with the fear of strangers with potential intention to cause harm to children and their teachers.
BALANCING LOW AND HIGH TECHNOLOGIES
Each generation of teachers and architects designing schools has faced the challenge of managing the introduction of new technologies in education. Radio and gramophones were first introduced into schools during the inter-war period as was cine film. In every case, there has been a challenge to the usual conventions of schooling and in every case these conventions have survived. Visual education was always associated with modern progressive methods and the USA led the way in the integration of communication technologies into the building. When the Medds visited the USA in 1958–1959, they were proudly shown the latest methods of integrating television in teaching. There has been an historical tendency to assume that such technologies have had a beneficial impact on the learning experience before sufficiently robust studies could examine the actual effects. This tendency has continued in relation to the introduction of digital technologies into schools.
It is well known that over a decade of international research studies have failed yet to prove a link between the improvement in the quality and outcomes of children’s learning and the use of Information and Communications Technologies in schools. Yet vast resources are expended to ensure that schools are equipped with the latest learning technologies despite evidence of impact being ambiguous at best. This has resulted in school design resting on an assumption that, given the ubiquitous computer, laptop or handheld device, the nature and form of the space in which learning activities happen is irrelevant beyond the basic necessities of providing access to power and shelter from the elements. In other words such assumptions have led to the construction of rather characterless ‘innovative’ environments more resembling a generalized workplace than a school. Some see this as a positive effect and an aspect of deinstitutionalization. For example, when the architect Kenneth Gärdestad designed a secondary school in Stockholm for the company Kunskapsskolan as a participant in a competition, he began by thinking through the design implications of a school where children would learn primarily through digital platforms at their own pace in any space provided. The result is a modern school environment with few books, many computers and a variety of learning spaces.
9.4 Kunskapsskolan, Stockholm. Architect Kenneth Gärdestad. The image shows the heart of the school which is a social and dining area. Upstairs a variety of study areas are visible. Photograph courtesy Kenneth Gärdestad
One can readily identify the Medd ingredients in this school which has attempted to remove the traditional classroom, subject areas and specialisms. Every morning the children gather in smaller groups with their teacher in their home base. At 9.00am, every group watches the morning news broadcast on national television followed by a discussion led by their teacher. After this they move to any part of the school building to work on their individually agreed programmes of learning. Mary and David Medd would have appreciated the efforts of the architect to design integrated bays for quiet work carried out by individuals or pairs of children. The carefully designed glass-fronted pods are attractive features but have in practice become problem areas of indiscipline where the spaces have been exploited by children for bullying. This is as example of a good idea that is consistent with the kind of variety of spaces – both in terms of physical size as well as performing the function of a place of retreat and quiet – that Mary Crowley’s ingredients of design suggested. For it to succeed, however, a form of stewardship (involving teachers and pupils) is needed to adjust the original design recognizing that while a minority of children might abuse the space, the majority will not.
Reviews of the primary curriculum carried out during the final phase of the New Labour government (2007–2009) revealed a renewed emphasis on connecting knowledge across disciplinary or subject areas coupled with a recognition that the use of learning technologies in classrooms has not so far brought about the transformation in education that was expected at an earlier stage.36 The author of one of these reviews noted that ‘memorisation and recall have come to be valued over understanding and inquiry, and transmission of information over the pursuit of knowledge in its fuller sense’.37 It was the latter – the pursuit of knowledge in the fuller sense – that was hoped to be achieved in the design of school buildings in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
Since the arrival of the ICT revolution over the past decades, a strong consensus has emerged among those concerned to improve the quality of teaching and learning in schools about the principles of design that this implies. These principles suggest a strong consistency with the legacy of the past as explained above. There are developments today that would have delighted pioneering educationalists, architects and artists in the past such as the involvement of children and young people themselves in the design of school buildings and the efforts to involve the community in their construction and maintenance. The survival of ‘Forest Schools’ and schools placing emphasis on first hand experience despite the growth of a reliance on information technologies would have pleased these school architects and they would have sought out what they called the ‘growth points in education’ today, arguing that it is educators, and education more than architects, that need to shape the school of the future. ‘The flexibility of the design makes it possible to respond to changing educational requirements.’38
Already in 1955, as the Crow Island School in Winnetka acquired its first extension, the Architectural Forum published an appraisal of this school 15 years into its life: ‘Schools: A Look Backward and Forward’.39 The journal editor declared ‘it still looks so good and works so splendidly, it is discouraging to the idea that each year’s designs are better than the preceding’.40 Revisiting Crow Island in 2011, that statement still rings true. It continues to look and function well and its educational philosophy has survived and been renewed through careful stewardship over the years. This has been helped enormously by long serving head teachers who have thoroughly understood the principle behind the building that the school should fit the child. In 1955, shortly before the Medds’ visit, the school was said to form a template for others in ‘atmosphere, compounded partly of scale, partly of materials, partly of detailing, infused with a loving patient perfection, inspirited by the civilized, humanizing values of calmness and warmth’.41
In the 1955 new classroom wing, the basic L shaped classroom with work space, corner window seat and associated yard was repeated as the users felt it could not be improved upon. But how relevant is this arrangement today? Teachers still appreciate the classroom space and arrangements that are used pretty much in the way they were originally intended. The large basement area of the school originally housed a workshop and science laboratory, room for visual education, music room, domestic science room, club and dining room for teachers and an office for the Winnetka publications on education.42 In 2011, the basement provides a similar function housing a computer suit, a photo lab, domestic science area and child-centered resources centre and library that was designed by William Brubaker of Perkins and Will in 1975.
Here very simple but effective reading lofts have worked brilliantly over the past 35 years encouraging children to curl up with a book and since they have to climb up into a cosy carpeted pod to do so, they meet the consistent need of children for such safe and secure withdrawal spaces so much fought for by the Medds in their primary schools. A very similar design has been introduced more recently at St Elizabeth School, Bethnal Green (SCABAL). This is an example of how low technologies that support direct first-hand experience and respect and engage the body of the pupil and the senses can sit comfortably alongside high technologies as a result of careful stewardship and recognition of the observed needs of children who continue to enjoy both.
9.5 Reading lofts at Crow Island School, Winnetka. Architects Wills and Perkins. Photograph C. Burke
9.6 Reading lofts St Elizabeth School, Bethnal Green, London. Architects, SCABAL. Photograph courtesy of SCABAL, Jun Keung Cheung
To celebrate its 50th year in 1990, the then head teacher of Crow Island School, Elizabeth Herbert organized a conference bringing together leading educationalists, childhood experts and architects. The school collected adult reflections on their experiences when they were pupils and presented the findings in a publication, Children, Learning and School Design.43 It is remarkable how clearly the recollections match the aspirations of the Medds in their work and also those of children and young people today as expressed in The Guardian surveys outlined above. Respect for the individual child was manifested in the scaled building and furniture, the benches in the auditorium, the height of light switches, the strips of wood along the brick hallways. It was ‘a building designed to accommodate our bodies and please our eyes’ and ‘everything was in my reach’. Creativity and experimentation, imagination and enquiry was encouraged through the provision of workrooms, courtyards, windows and these were recalled as ‘workrooms gave you space for ongoing projects to try out …’ and ‘the huge windows and the wooded view stimulated imagination and creativity. Comfort and homeliness was achieved through the fireplaces, the built in window benches and the resource centre lofts and the building was remembered as ‘very friendly and comfortable for us little ones … even then I knew it’ and ‘One of my favourite memories was cuddling up with a good book in the Resources Center’s lofts ….’44
SUSTAINABILITY: A LOOK BACKWARD TO THE FUTURE
The novelist and futurist Bruce Sterling has argued ‘accessing knowledge that you didn’t know you possessed is both faster and more reliable than discovering it’.45 When this is put in the context of school design and educational theory, looking back towards the future is arguably also more sustainable, economical and efficient. Schools designed quickly to meet demand in the post-war period were never intended to last the 50 or 60 plus years that has elapsed since. It was assumed that education would change sufficiently to require radically different forms of environment. The pioneering school buildings were designed by architects keeping one step ahead of the educationalists and predicting the way forward. It is true to say that education has changed but less true to say the same of schooling or indeed of children. In spite of major advances in educational technologies, societies continue to require schools to lay the foundations for a socially sustainable future and children need humane places to nurture their full development and well being.
9.7 Eveline Lowe School with extension, 2011. Architect John Pardey in association with HKR architects. Photograph courtesy Malcolm Woods
Education ensures cultural continuity, but is also an agent for change. School makes a lasting impression on us all. It is a learning environment that expresses certain relationships between people and place; between children and adults; between experience and understanding; between information and knowledge; between the physical, the emotional and the intellectual.46
In carrying forward the sensitive redesign at Eveline Lowe school, the architect John Pardey has maintained the ‘kiva’ which may be the equivalent of the ‘bean bag’ so much desired by children surveyed in the 2001 and 2011 ‘School I’d Like’ initiatives. However, teachers today who do not understand the ‘philosophy in brick’ are more likely to use the space for storage than for its original purpose as current health and safety policies make it difficult for teachers to allow children to retreat into such spaces without adult supervision.
As we have seen, Eveline Lowe was designed as a practical investigation of many educational issues and questions. First, could the design of a building modelled on a ‘village school’ incorporating principles of flexibility, variety and openness be realized in a heavily congested urban environment? Second, could the adventurousness of the design offer architects and educators of the future a sustained opportunity to challenge the hegemony of the classroom? Third, would the inbuilt range of sensory variables be sufficiently understood and appropriately used and developed through habitation?47
The school was originally designed for the age group 5–9. The new school, which opened in 2011, has doubled in size incorporating the junior school that had occupied an Edwardian building across the road. With refurbishment has come a new image and the school has been renamed Phoenix Primary School after a poll of the schools’ pupils. The new teaching staff were unaware of the historical significance of their building nor of the name and were keen to make a break with the past. Had they been familiar with the story told in this book and the evolution through research of the planning ingredients that had shaped Eveline Lowe, they might well have understood its potential. The building being listed, they were somewhat frustrated that they were unable to take away some of the original features such as the timber-clad bays originally designed for dining and small group work.
The design for the new school incorporates the old listed buildings and was selected from a list of four finalists in an architectural competition published in Building Design.48 John Pardey recognized the Scandinavian influence of the Medds’ original school design and has done much to preserve the unique features.49
Moving through this school, we find a sympathetic refurbishment. The timber cladding of the general display areas and bays has been cleaned and is restored to its original state, reminiscent of the Scandinavian influence. Parts that have been preserved include small bays for one or two children to work, spaces for small groups, larger spaces for general work and a courtyard on to which all of the rooms can easily access. No one room looks or feels the same as another – except the new buildings that have recently been added which are of a traditional classroom design.
9.8 Eveline Lowe renewal, interior bays re-configured as an ‘internet café’. Photograph courtesy Malcolm Woods
The view of the child that inspired the original design of Eveline Lowe School was very different from that which informs design in the present. Crucially, best practice and successful schools were defined not solely by their results determined by standard tests but by their ethos, the characteristics of what might be observed to be happening and by the quality of some of the work produced by children.50 Originally, a broad definition of excellence prevailed incorporating work with hands as well as brain. This was summed up by the Senior Inspector for Primary Education, Christian Schiller who stated the characteristics of a good junior school to be:
that the school conceives of primary education, not as a preparation for something to follow, but as a fulfilment of a stage of development;
that the school seeks to achieve this fulfilment, not by securing certain standards of attainment, but by providing in abundance such experiences and activities as will enable all the children to develop to the full at each phase of growth;
that the children are expressing their powers in language, in movement, in music, in painting, and in making things – that is to say, as artists;
that the children are expressing their powers in observation, in counting, and in the use of the body – that is to say, as workmen (sic);
that the children are learning to live together to the best advantage.51
Schiller also drew particular attention to the design of the building, the imaginative use of the school’s outdoor spaces and to the importance of following children’s natural rhythms and needs for rest. From this we can understand that architects who were guided by this view of the child ensured their buildings enabled ease of access to the outdoors and a variety of spaces including spaces designated as quiet or rest rooms where children might withdraw from the hubbub of activities.
The notion of a democracy or ‘future-building school’ was not out of place here as this had been an ideal in post-war school design not only in England but also in other parts of Europe, northern Italy most notably.52 Schools such as this drew strength from a radical tradition in public schooling that, through inspired leadership and engagement with the arts, the mechanistic and institutional characteristics of education might be resisted transforming the school as a given, reconfiguring it into a comfortable and creative home where learning might happen in an atmosphere of freedom.53
NOTES
1 From Mary Crowley’s hand written copy of article about Crow Island School published in Architecture Forum (1941). IOE Archives.
2 Elizabeth A. Herbert interview with Allessandro De Gregori, 21 June 2006. Available online: http://mcgraw-hillresearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ReimaginingInterviewsDeGregori.pdf. Accessed 31 October 2012.
3 Zaha Hadid Architects. Evelyn Grace Academy. http://www.zaha-hadid.com/architecture/evelyn-grace-academy//. Accessed 29 August 2012.
4 Rowan Moore, The Observer, 17 October 2010.
5 Exceptional private practices are SCABAL and Feilden Clegg and Bradley in London, who have both examined and used the history of education in their school building design work.
6 Keri Facer (2011) Learning Futures. Education, Technology and Social Change, London. Routledge.
7 Emphasis in original.
8 Facer (2011) pp. 109–23.
9 Ibid. p. 127.
10 A. Peacock ‘So Have Things Changed? Four Generations at an English Primary School’, Education, 3–13, 31, no. 1 (2003).
11 Michael Shaw, book review, Times Educational Supplement, 20 May 2011. http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6082663.
12 R. Walden (ed.) (2009) Schools for the Future. Design Proposals from Architectural Psychology. Gottingen. Hogrefe and Hubner Publishers. p. 195.
13 Hille (2011) p. 17.
14 J. A. Lackney, ‘A Design Language for Schools and Learning Communities’ in Walden (2009) p. 159.
15 The UCL Academy. http://www.uclacademy.com/new-building.html. Accessed: 30 August 2012.
16 Schiller (1972) p. 95.
17 Parker (2005) p. 111.
18 C. Burke ‘About Looking’, Paedagogica Historica (2010).
19 Schiller (1972) The Primary School. London. Architecture and Planning Publications Ltd.
20 The Architectural Forum, August 1941. Crow Island School Winnetka, notes on planning by Carlton Washburne, pp. 80–92.
21 See for example the process developed by Peter Hübner. Peter Blundell-Jones (2007) Peter Hübner – Building as a Social Process. Stuttgart. Axel Menges.
22 A similar exercise was hosted by the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia in 2005.
23 ‘The School I’d Like: Here is What you Wanted’, The Guardian, 3 May 2011.
24 UK government Building Schools for the Future (BSF) and Primary Capital Programmes (PCP).
25 E. Blishen (1969) The School That I’d Like. London. Penguin.
26 Dea Birkett, ‘The Children’s Manifesto’, 3 May 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/may/03/school-i-would-like-childrens-manifesto. Accessed: 30 August 2012. Children’s drawings tell us as much if not more than their words but there is not space here to do justice to that topic.
27 All quotes from Birkett (2011).
28 MBC, ‘Designing for the Under Fives’ (1976).
29 C. Thau and K. Vindum (2002) Jacobsen. The Danish Architectural Press. Copenhagen. p. 35.
30 David and Mary Medd (1971) p. 8.
31 Carlton Washburne, ‘The Schools Response to the Challenge of Childhood’, Mental Hygiene, 19, no. 1, January 1935. pp. 47–58. See also Washburne (1940) p. 38.
32 David and Mary Medd (1971) p. 10.
33 Washburne (1940) pp. 40–41.
34 David and Mary Medd (1971) p. 8.
35 Washburne (1940) pp. 40–41.
36 The Rose Review of the Primary Curriculum (2009) and the Cambridge Primary Review (2010) both make references to the past.
37 Robin Alexander (2009) The Cambridge Primary Review.
38 Elizabeth Herbert, quoted in Jane Clarke, Philosophy in Brick, p. 59.
39 ‘Schools: A Look Backward and Forward’, Architectural Forum, October 1955. pp. 129–38.
40 Ibid. p. 129.
41 Ibid.
42 A. Roth (1957) p. 111.
43 Elizabeth Herbert and Anne Meek (1992) Children, Learning and School Design. Winnetka. Winnetka Public Schools.
44 Elizabeth Herbert and Anne Meek (1992) pp. 35–8.
45 Bruce Sterling (2005) The Shape of Things. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press.
46 Eileen Adams cited in DLM (2009) p. 33.
47 There were seven experimental quiet areas each with its own particular character and no two spaces were the same.
48 Building Design, 30 May 2008.
49 Pardey spent a year in Denmark writing a biography of the architect Vilhelm Wohlhert.
50 Robin Tanner’s Inspection Report on Finmere School which quotes from a child’s writing about grass.
51 C. Griffin-Beale (ed.) (1979) Christian Schiller in His Own Words. London. A. C. Black Publishers. p. 1.
52 Michael Fielding and Peter Moss (2011).
53 C. Burke and I. Grosvenor, ‘The Steward Street School Experiment: A Critical Case Study of Possibilities’, British Educational Research Journal, 18 October 2011. Available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01411926.2011.615386.