Typology Quarterly:
Schools
29 March 2012 | By Christian Kuhn
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In the industrial era, schools developed as highly
controlled environments to instil the discipline to
thrive in a machine age. Now, to prepare pupils for
success in a knowledge economy, the evolving
typology is more fluidly conceived to provide
flexibility, connectivity, and spaces for social and
educational encounters
Schools have always been a reflection of a society’s stage of
development. The painting by Dutch artist Jan Steen (see
previous page) illustrates a 17th-century village school
where hardly a child appears to be engaged in studying as
we know it today. But as strange as the scene may seem,
following recent ‘constructivist’ learning theories, most of
these children are actively involved in a learning process.
A completely different atmosphere is portrayed in a
classroom scene set in a German village school, painted in
1848 by Albert Anker. There are rows of benches; boys and
girls are separated, with the boys occupying the pole
position and the girls placed on the sidelines. The teacher is
armed with a cane, which helps him to at least impress the
first two rows of pupils. To a large extent, this classroom is a
by-product of the Industrial Revolution. The school had
become an institution designed to drill people for the
economy of the Machine Age, which depended on a reliable
and productive workforce.
In terms of the basic setting, early modern learning spaces
were not so different to their predecessors, at least as far as
mainstream education is concerned. As modern as they look
from the outside (take, for example, Jan Duiker’s famous
Open Air School in Amsterdam, built in 1927-30), the
classroom itself has hardly changed. Of course, it has
become spacious and light, and girls and boys are once again
treated as equals. But it is still a highly controlled space,
symbolising another stage in the Industrial Revolution, that
is the rise of the service sector and a growing need for people
working in administration.
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Hans Scharoun’s Geschwister Scholl School, 1961
Today, the majority of schools across the world continue to
follow this standard model and its associated typologies.
Even those among recent schools that are aesthetically more
ambitious usually adhere to the teacher-centred classroomand-
corridor model that has been the standard for almost
two centuries. Why should we expect radically different
learning spaces will become mainstream any time soon?
The main reason can be found in the post-industrial society
and the demands of its knowledge economy. Almost a
decade ago, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD) published a study on ‘Key
Qualifications for a Successful Life and a Well-Functioning
Society’ (Rychen and Salganik, 2003) that identified a set of
three essential qualifications: ‘act autonomously’, ‘interact in
heterogeneous groups’ and ‘use tools interactively’.
‘Acting autonomously’ requires students to set their own
goals, to take their own decisions and to assume
responsibility for the results. ‘Interacting in heterogeneous
groups’ relates to a society that requires cross-cultural
understanding and co-operation, both on the local level (due
to migration) and on the global level (due to globalisation),
but also across different age groups in an ageing society.
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Aldo Rossi’s Middle School, Broni, 1983
‘Use tools interactively’ relates to the importance of
information requiring responsible users, who are able to
tailor technology according to their needs. Helping students
to acquire these qualifications requires forms of teaching
that go beyond traditional models: these include moving
from teacher-directed to self-directed learning; personalised
learning, which reduces instruction time and increases
project work; dividing up the social unit of a class into
subgroups and creating new forms of learning partnerships;
teaching in teams and across disciplines; and opening up the
school to the network of learning that surrounds it
physically and virtually.
School buildings that respond to these changing needs may
be best identified by their ‘Space for Teams’, offering an
adaptive infrastructure with well-designed microenvironments.
In regard to typology, we can expect a greater
variety than that allowed for by the standard model,
although the new schools share at least four characteristic
features: flexibility, clustering, a common core and
connectivity.
The first feature, flexibility, offers the possibility of creating
different learning arrangements to meet different needs.
This does not necessarily lead to an open-plan school or to
machinery with sliding doors and partitions. Flexibility of
usage can be achieved through a better granularity of room
sizes in combination with sophisticated time management.
As a by-product, this offers a potentially higher level of
efficiency than in the standard model, where circulation
spaces are mostly unusable for learning and monofunctional
classrooms are underused. Clustering, the second
feature, is delivered by dividing up the school space into a
hierarchy of smaller clusters, introducing an intermediate
level between the former classroom and the school as a
whole, and support-team teaching. These clusters are the
result of the experience that complex team-building
processes work best in a large group of 150 people sharing a
territory.
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Leutschenbach School by Christian Kerez
The third feature, the common core, is an informal meeting
place and a melting pot for the school as a whole. And last
but not least, the idea of connectivity plays a vital role. This
implies that the school is a node in a wider network of
learning, locally optimising the use of learning institutions,
such as schools, kindergarten and library; and globally using
the potential of ICT.
It is important to note that none of these ideas is new.
They have been discussed and implemented during the
major wave of school reform in the 1960s. In spite of initial
positive results, none of these buildings was a lasting
success. The spaces’ sound-proofing proved insufficient;
artificial lighting and ventilation made the users feel
uncomfortable. The main problem, however, was that
teachers had not been adequately trained, and as they were
rarely involved in the planning process, they did not feel
much incentive to live up to a concept that might have been
promising in theory, but did not perform in everyday life.
Today’s similar concepts can only be successful if the lessons
of these large-scale experiments are properly learned. First,
they indicate how important the participation of users in the
planning process is. The majority of the most innovative
schools of the last decade have been designed in planning
processes involving as many stakeholders as possible. This
requires a lot of effort, and costs time and money.
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Romania School by Herman Hertzberger
But this is well invested, since users not only feel more
satisfied with the results, but also become experts who help
to create better designs.
Second, architects 40 years ago attempted to create
aesthetically neutral spaces, hoping that the users would fill
them with life. Again, recent successful examples chose a
different approach, attempting to develop memorable school
spaces.
The big challenge here is to create spaces that are as
attractive as possible while at the same time kept open for
future changes. The examples reviewed overleaf try to find
the right balance between robust infrastructures and
carefully designed (but not over-designed) microenvironments
that can be adapted by the users.