[HN Gopher] Rethinking School Design
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Rethinking School Design
Author : samsolomon
Score : 41 points
Date : 2024-10-17 17:09 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (architizer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (architizer.com)
| WalterBright wrote:
| Meanwhile, educational results seem to get worse!
|
| BTW, I went to those horrible school buildings the article talks
| about, and experienced none of the bad effects claimed.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I see no mention of the guiding principles for schools of the
| past. They were built to be cheap, long lasting, and durable
| (storm shelters). Every one of these newer building looks like a
| high priced and high maintenance design. I don't see any problem
| with the old bland cinderblock design. I feel that much of the
| psychology around the building looks is forgetting that people
| get used to things and that bland isn't necessarily bad if the
| other content and decor are the primary focus (as they should be
| Inna school).
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > Every one of these newer building looks like a high priced
| and high maintenance design
|
| Not really possible to judge from pictures, as it depends on
| material selection, durability etc. Good architects can make
| nice things without breaking the bank.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Just cleaning the vaulted ceilings and all the high windows
| is a big difference that can be seen in the pictures.
| Multiple large windows are also a contraindication for it
| being a storm shelter.
| volkk wrote:
| are schools in china traditionally used as storm shelters?
| perhaps they have separate buildings for that kind of thing
| giantg2 wrote:
| China's imperative is to build cheap and even disposable
| buildings. The difference in storm shelter paradigms and
| design considerations is a tangent at best considering we
| don't share the same concerns here or whatever
| alternative buildings you are insinuating.
| jdietrich wrote:
| No, but in large parts of China they're supposed to be
| earthquake-resistant.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Sichuan_earthquake#Col
| lap...
| Miraste wrote:
| Why would it need to be a storm shelter? The only place in
| the world where schools need to be storm shelters is the
| midwestern US.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Perhaps the frequency of storms. For example, Europe
| doesn't have many storms of the same intensity as the
| tornadoes of the Midwest or the hurricanes of the South.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Even worse when the school building is aesthetically designed
| for a limited number of viewpoints or even just one viewpoint.
|
| My own school growing up had a boring rear entrance but a
| brochure-worthy front entrance that looked traditional and
| dignified. Unfortunately, that front entrance was virtually
| never used since the playgrounds and parking lots were much
| closer to the rear entrance. As a result, us kids were
| sentenced to staring at the boring posterior of the school and
| never took away much inspiration from the architecture.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'd be more concerned with a lack of inspiration from the
| schooling. Relying on architecture is a poor lesson in
| inspiration and creativity. People with creative mindsets can
| create beauty in how they decorate and use the space, just as
| much or even more so than relying on the space design itself.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| These sorts of schools were modeled after prisons (and actually
| were designed by the same people designing prisons).
|
| Architecture that looks bad is effectively communicating to its
| occupants what the institution running it thinks of them and
| what the institution is about. If you model it like a prison,
| then think about what this communicates and internalizes.
|
| Before the prison/factory campus came into existence, we did
| have beautiful schools. And they're still standing.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "These sorts of schools were modeled after prisons (and
| actually were designed by the same people designing
| prisons)."
|
| TFA says this is mostly legend more than fact.
|
| "Before the prison/factory campus came into existence, we did
| have beautiful schools. And they're still standing."
|
| This is survivor bias and tends to include expensive private
| schools and higher education. Most of those designs have
| similar "negative" features that the article describes as
| many of them are gothic, built in a time when glass was
| limited in size or expense, etc.
|
| "If you model it like a prison, then think about what this
| communicates and internalizes."
|
| Have the kids spent time in a prision? If the kids don't have
| a baseline for a what a prison is like, then this conjecture
| about what it communicates is moot as the fundamental
| exchange of the idea isn't present. People reiterating that
| they are built like prisons are more detrimental than the
| design itself.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| You see prison on TV even as a child. remember the first
| time I saw my US high school in person and my first thought
| was that it was clearly a prison inspired design. They had
| an interior balcony where the each level was viewable from
| each other level. Unlike a mall the walls were opaque and
| each door identical with a number.
|
| If the school was properly organized it could be in an
| actual prison for all would have cared. I think de-
| streaming is far worse than bad decor.
| nemo44x wrote:
| It's because they're built by tax dollars and the last thing
| you want to do is be seen to be wasting tax dollars on
| frivolous things. Nice private schools look great because the
| clientele expects that and pays for that aesthetic. Also
| consider that often the highest tax payers and most
| influential people in a community won't send their kids to
| the local school so have no interest in having higher taxes
| fund a nice building. I'm not saying that's good or bad, just
| that it is.
|
| > Before the prison/factory campus came into existence, we
| did have beautiful schools. And they're still standing.
|
| The nice ones are. There are likely many old school buildings
| that were cheaply constructed and didn't stand the test of
| time.
|
| The nice old school building in my town had to have hundreds
| of millions of dollars put into it because it didn't have AC,
| a staircase collapsed, and about 100 other serious issues
| that needed addressing to modernize it. Our community voted
| YES to funding it through a raise in property taxes but our
| community is already affluent and the town did a good job
| specifying exactly what the money would be spent on.
|
| So it costs money and often times people don't see the value
| in that.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Most private schools by numbers are religiously affiliated
| and relatively plain. Many are in older buildings. The
| newer ones have mostly the same design of corridors with
| identical classrooms.
|
| "The nice ones are. There are likely many old school
| buildings that were cheaply constructed and didn't stand
| the test of time."
|
| Yes, that's what survivor bias means.
| xemoka wrote:
| This was very much my first thought as well, that the costs of
| these buildings are far higher than schools of the past. It's
| good to want nice things, but there is a tradeoff.
|
| There is a new highschool being built in my community to
| replace an aging one. The time and cost overruns of the custom
| designed building, featuring a towering atrium/lobby and
| ascetically pleasing frontage, has pushed back the move-in date
| to midsemester/next year.
|
| Part of me loves that these schools look so much nicer and
| contain an environment better than the ones I went to growing
| up---another part of me knows that we have _many_ schools that
| need replacing of the same age as this new one's predecessor,
| and hardly a budget capable of doing so if they all are to be
| completed similarly.
|
| Our drive and desire for "nicer" things (or at least things
| that dress up well), when we can barely fund the necessities,
| seems to be a hard dichotomy to deal with. How do we accomplish
| both?
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| This feels like a very important question: why the hell don't
| we seem to be able to do this efficiently, despite our vast
| resources and all the advances we've made in engineering,
| materials science, and automation in recent decades?
|
| As much as the leftie in me wants to say we're not funding
| it, we are. Per-student, inflation-adjusted funding for
| education has gone up a full 50% in my lifetime [1], to more
| than $18k per student-year. $18k is a lot - for a classroom
| of 30 students, that's half a million dollars a year. We
| _have_ the money, and indeed far more money than we once had,
| in a world where things are cheaper and easier. We should be
| able to do everything we did generations ago and then some.
| Sure, there are demands we make now that we didn 't make then
| (like "maybe not with the asbestos", "kids with wheelchairs
| should be able to get places", and "maybe people with
| learning disabilities should get a chance"), but I have a
| hard time believing that those are adding >50% in real terms.
|
| To me, the interesting question isn't the trade-offs, it's
| why we need to make them at all. It seems like we shouldn't.
|
| The most appealing explanation to me is that there's a sort
| of low-grade hum of background corruption that is hard to
| detect but acting as a sort of friction on public-works
| projects. But that's hard enough to falsify that it's hard to
| be too confident in it, either.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/203118/expenditures-
| per-...
| DowagerDave wrote:
| 30 kids in a class... what, did you attend private school?
| panzagl wrote:
| More money for education doesn't necessarily mean more
| money for buildings- they often have to be floated by bonds
| separate from the main budget.
|
| Schools have more features than 75 years ago- better hvac,
| higher power requirements, better comms.
|
| Government construction has to follow all the regulations,
| including a bunch specific to the government to fight
| corruption or waste.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > higher power requirements
|
| Arguably, the power requirements have been trending
| downwards since the 90s. Switching teachers and students
| to laptops instead of chonky desktops almost certainly
| has made a dent in power consumption. Further better
| insulation and hvac systems has almost certainly cut down
| on power costs.
| panzagl wrote:
| I was thinking more construction costs- now every room
| needs many outlets instead of the one that the overhead
| projector cart plugs into. Power efficient lights,
| insulation etc. require higher construction costs but
| reduce operating costs. My middle school was a neat piece
| of 1920's architecture, but lacked a lot of amenities
| that would be considered necessary now.
| cogman10 wrote:
| The answer is simple, we've been ever expanding the number
| of roles for maintaining a school.
|
| For example, pretty much every school now-a-days has 1 or
| multiple SROs assigned to their schools. Cops get paid
| quite well which means throwing an additional $250k+ into
| everyone's budget.
|
| Every school now has an IT department which practically did
| not exist in the past. That costs money.
|
| Then there is just general admin bloat that takes an
| excessive chunk of money out of schools (For example, PR
| and marketing for public schools... which is a bit
| ridiculous, but you district almost certainly is employing
| them).
|
| There are also just general infrastructure bills coming due
| with construction prices being higher than ever. Schools
| built in the 70s are often in desperate need of
| repair/refurbishment.
|
| Corruption may play a role, but I suspect the way it mostly
| manifests itself is a principle hiring their do-nothing
| family member in a role they aren't qualified to fill (so
| they double fill it).
| timeon wrote:
| Why would school need a cop?
| lubujackson wrote:
| Our society is like an old software project where we have
| hacked things on (bureaucratically) to address bugs one by
| one until we are left with an insane hydra system.
|
| Build schools is expensive because of everything but
| building the school. Surveying the land. Getting approval
| for noise and traffic. Ecological impact studies. Permits
| for everything. Minor plan changes requiring re-approval of
| everything. Not to mention all the legal parameters and
| latent threats around every decision.
|
| Yes, corruption flourishes in red tape. But it is not
| exactly the source of the problem.
| maxglute wrote:
| Evidenced based design studies on how some designs better than
| others at promoting healing in hospital design. Not familiar
| with school studies but I imagine at some point schools should
| be calibrated to facilitate learning instead of storm shelters
| (or in US, securitized against shooters). IIRC old
| enviromental-psych, "nice" enviroments reduce stress, increase
| attention etc. Regardless why get used to bland? It's good to
| just be in a nice built enviroment.
| giantg2 wrote:
| My point is, what defines "nice" is based on one's
| experience. If you get people used to luxury, they will
| demand it and see declines if it's not met. Most of the
| hospital improvements are not about having pretty rooms. The
| pretty rooms are usually only one part of a much bigger group
| of changes to make things more tolerable. Those other changes
| are likely bigger factors in comfort.
| maxglute wrote:
| Evidenced based design is an architecture field. They try
| to quantify what aspects of built enviroment improves XYZ.
| I don't disagree with your gist, but sometimes it does come
| down to more expensive layouts (i.e. trying increase
| light/window coverage) or finishes that pushes per sq cost
| up in institutional buildings.
|
| I can't tell you if a lot of these designs are architecture
| wank, or actually seriously informed by literature,
| although architects do pour over relevant literature if
| only to post rationalize / sell designs.
| pcaharrier wrote:
| Do these design changes drive a change in the philosophy of
| education or is it the other way around? The author of the
| article doesn't dive into that issue very much, but if a change
| in the architecture of schools will help drive some much-needed
| changes in education itself (the "rigidity" mentioned throughout)
| so much the better.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Some people might see a certain level of rigidity to be
| beneficial to a child's development. Now we need to get into
| philosophical debate over the potential psychological impacts
| of design. I imagine the stoics would disagree that discipline
| is a bad thing (actual discipline and not punishment).
| pcaharrier wrote:
| Discipline and structure are good and necessary, but that's
| not what I'm getting at (and I think we probably agree there)
| when I say "rigidity." Students (especially young children)
| aren't widgets to be pushed through a factory, but
| individuals for whom some degree of flexibility is required.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Given the shrinking demographic, it's difficult to see why anyone
| would bother. Whatever problems schools have, it's not the
| architecture.
| jrsdav wrote:
| The unfortunate trend I've witnessed in newer schools in my neck
| of the US (west) is to essentially make them fortresses, a place
| where entrances and exits are tightly controlled and each
| classroom can quickly be locked down. They honestly feel like
| prisons.
|
| We all remarked on the classroom during back to school week this
| year for my third grader with "wow, you get an actual window this
| year!". Other classrooms in the school have no windows or natural
| lighting at all.
|
| One guess as to why this is becoming the norm.
| JRandomHacker42 wrote:
| Jacob Geller did a really interesting video essay [1] about the
| parallels that can be drawn between modern school architecture
| and maps from shooter games - on top of whatever other context
| or functionality they provide, they are fundamentally spaces
| that are designed around the question "what happens if violence
| occurs here?"
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usSfgHGEGxQ
| vundercind wrote:
| It's deeply fucked-up if you look at the odds of an
| indiscriminate shooting (what we're mainly worried about--less
| so the killer seeking a single specific victim who happens to
| choose to find them in a school) occurring while a given
| student is present _any time_ in their 13 years of primary and
| secondary education. Loosen it to "any gun violence at all" (a
| way, way larger category) and the odds are still tiny.
|
| School shootings are shameful and we should take steps to make
| them stop, but subjecting _all kids_ to freakishly locked-down
| buildings and shooter drills and all that is not a reaction
| supported by the statistics. We're causing mass harm to kids
| over a panic.
| timeon wrote:
| Can't imagine to grow in environment like that. Luckily, guns
| are regulated here and people can walk free.
| spankalee wrote:
| These look like schools with lots of space and lots of funding.
|
| Meanwhile, where I live, schools don't even have fields, gyms, or
| kitchens because there's not enough room on the lot. Urban vs
| suburban design constraints are just really large.
|
| I'd like to see more exploration of school designs for urban
| environments.
|
| Can we make the schools taller? Does that need better stairways
| and maybe escalators? What are the implications? Older kids on
| the upper floors so the littler ones don't have to climb stairs
| as much?
|
| Can we put fields on the roof?
|
| How can we be more efficient with services? Can we combine
| schools and public libraries? Rec centers?
|
| Growing up in a good suburbanish school system myself, it's
| pretty depressing to see what passes for elementary schools in
| some cities.
| timeon wrote:
| > How can we be more efficient with services? Can we combine
| schools and public libraries? Rec centers?
|
| Using the facilities 'after-school' is good idea.
| variaga wrote:
| Call this a cautionary tale about 'rethinking' school design.
|
| The high school I went to was designed/built in 1973 by some
| people who "re-thought" school design. Their idea was a 'flexible
| learning space' - basically a giant open-plan area where
| different classes would just sort of sit in circles in one big
| room. Certain rooms - the library, admin offices, the science
| labs - were walled off individually but most general classes
| would just be in this big open space. Teachers were assigned
| rolling desks with a locking roll-top that they could move around
| to whatever spot on the floor their class would be in that day,
| kids would circle the desks around and creativity would thrive
| (or something...)
|
| This plan was basically a disaster. Getting a bunch of teenagers
| to focus on a lesson is hard enough without the distraction of
| dozens of other classes within visible/audible range. Within the
| first year they retrofit the whole building with walls to break
| the big open space up into conventional classrooms. The walls
| were vinyl panels stretched between the structural columns - if
| you pressed on them, they would flex noticeably. It worked well
| enough, but one side effect of the late addition of walls was
| that the HVAC had been designed for one big room with a few
| 'zones' of control. When all the vinyl walls went in, they didn't
| align to the 'zones' so there would be a thermostat in one room,
| but the heat/AC vent(s) would be in other rooms, leading to some
| classrooms constantly being too-hot or too-cold.
|
| 20 years after this (the '90s, when I attended) there was still
| one room filled with the long-unused rolling desks with locking
| roll-tops.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Someone did that where I went to high school as well. I'm
| pretty sure it was a cost cutting measure, but the entire
| school was basically built without hallways. In one of the most
| humid and rainiest locales in the continental United States.
| Changing classes? Enjoy the rain! Someone stands there with the
| door open? Enjoy the 80% humidity condensing on everything in
| the room! Need to go the restroom at 2 PM? High temperature is
| only 100 F, but with the heat island effect the air temperature
| is a completely normal 120 F
| mortenjorck wrote:
| I went to a middle school in the 1990s that clearly came out of
| the same 1970s wave of "rethinking school design." Ours had the
| benefit of the what-were-we-thinking retrofit walls being
| proper drywall, but, perhaps in trying to dodge the climate
| control problems you mention, most classrooms still didn't have
| doors.
|
| I wouldn't learn what the Lindy effect was until decades later,
| but looking back, it was an instructive early lesson.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| You can "re think" things all you want but so long as the
| administrators have every incentive to run the place like some
| perverse combination of a minimum security prison and a locked
| mental health facility all the terribleness will remain because
| the organizations, the processes they adopt and the buildings
| they inhabit are a reflection of the incentives that shape them.
| rsolva wrote:
| What we really should do, is rethinking School. The design of the
| buildings is not the problem. The Sudbury Valley model is a
| fascinating take on a different kind of educational environment:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYHKbbLk7V4
|
| EDIT: That said, these schools looks like they could be a good
| fit for a Sudbury-style school :)
| ziddoap wrote:
| I don't think this is an either/or situation. Both can be
| rethought.
| janalsncm wrote:
| A second-order benefit of schools being more inviting spaces for
| students is that they are also nicer for teachers. Maybe this
| would allow schools to tap into a larger talent pool. Of course
| in China teachers are also paid well, so that helps too.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It's always interesting to me to see sweeping statements about
| what things are like from people who have experienced only a very
| small sample of possibilities across the space they're commenting
| on. My schools were nothing like a prison. In fact, we had a
| juvenile prison in my hometown that was called a "school for
| boys," as well a continuation school, which is where they sent
| everyone who wasn't a criminal but had been expelled from the
| other schools. They both looked drastically different from the
| regular schools. We had no hallways. It was all open air between
| classes. Windows were abundant.
|
| My wife was surprised by this the first time she saw my high
| school, as she'd grown up in the northeast and the schools were
| indoors and more like what this article describes. It's always
| worth reminding ourselves as Americans that we live in a very big
| country that is not at all uniform from coast to coast.
| henning wrote:
| This is what it looks like to live in a weird architectural
| design bubble where you think spoiled rich kid schools are all
| schools. Like an attractive person for whom regular people
| literally do not cognitively exist, the shitty schools all over
| the world that lack basic supplies and do not pay teachers enough
| do not exist, so we are free to think about cool architecture you
| can post pictures of on your portfolio.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > For decades, school design was synonymous with rigidity. Rows
| of identical classrooms, harsh lighting and long, narrow
| corridors created environments that felt more like factories --
| or worse, prisons -- than places for nurturing young minds.
|
| ...and those bastards went out and won World War 2. The end.
| DowagerDave wrote:
| so many rich (mostly white) kids!
| troupo wrote:
| This article could've been written by ChatGPT. It's bland
| marketing spiel with feel-good emotions and nothing concrete.
|
| Nothing exemplifies this more than the section on "Cultivating
| Imagination Through Playful Design". Despite the header it shows
| the most bland and generic "scandinavian design" imaginable with
| no place for either imagination or playfulness.
|
| This is exactly how many of these soulless buildings are built by
| "jack of all trades and a soon-to-be Master of Architectures": by
| stringing together the most basic of shapes with utter disregard
| for history, culture, or context, and slapping meaningless word
| diarrhoea onto them.
| havblue wrote:
| I cringe whenever I hear people praise Scandinavian schools: if
| we raise taxes and get rid of private schools, (to copy what
| they did in Norway) our public schools will be just as good.
| Copying Hermione Granger's homework does not make you Hermione
| Granger.
|
| One amusing thing I noticed was the lack of stuff in the
| classrooms. At my kid's class there needs to be room for bags,
| books, television, a PC for testing, headphones, Chromebooks
| etc. no way all that would fit in these new-age spaces.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| These all look like an adult architect's idea of what kids should
| like, and not so much a kid's idea of what an appealing learning
| environment would look like.
|
| They all have that blocky clean-lined repetitive modernist look.
| Quirky window placings and the odd splashes of colour don't hide
| the lack of variety, texture, or spontaneity. They're still very
| regimented spaces - all straight lines and grids. Some have some
| natural elements, but even those are very tightly controlled.
|
| A few look like very small open plan startup offices.
| Affric wrote:
| Agree to some extent but let me take it in a slightly different
| direction:
|
| None of them seem to be in use.
|
| Show me how they look at full occupancy. Let me see how they
| are for a year. Then I will judge.
|
| The biggest problem with architecture copy, and what means it's
| not journalism, is that it's not post occupancy. It's really
| rare that they show you how it looks and how it's performing 10
| years in.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| The built-like-prison implies a sort of bad faith when other
| reasons could be viable, e.g., taxpayer resistance to extra
| expenditures, or the requirement to build a large number of
| schools, quickly, in the 1950-1970 period in response to the baby
| boom and the Civil Rights movement in the US.
|
| I find these kinds of architectural pieces about as useful as
| browsing the concept cars at a motor show. Sure, pretty n all,
| but can you build them for a forty year lifespan? Can you build
| them cheaply enough to crank out dozens in the poorest parts of
| town, where the existing schools really are crumbling? Can you
| build them to adapt not just to what you see today but what you
| cant see tomorrow? Can you build for the fact that kids can be
| incredibly destructive, even on a good day?
|
| I've lived through the 1930s school building with wooden desk
| era, the Brutalist era, the open-plan circle-time class layout
| era, the aluminum and glass (freezing in winter!) era, and all I
| can say is I wish these architects had to live with what they
| created.
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