Description
In England, the Department for Education and Skills takes a strategic role in advising and, to a considerable extent, determining the size, layout and organisation of new schools. For example it produces what are called Building Bulletins, which proscribe many critical areas of the design agenda. Similar guidance is promoted by other national systems in Europe and the USA, most of which is developed in an effort to maintain critical standards and in order to control costs. For example, a floor area of 1.8 to 2.2 metres square per pupil is a commonly held standard for schools, whereas, 2.5 to 3.5 metres square is common for early years facilities. Because standards such as this relate directly to the budget provided, even if the designer feels more space is required, they would not be able to afford to do it without going over budget.
The thinking here is that since the school has a pre-determined technical specification and is paid for out of public taxation, the government has a responsibility to exert commonly held standards. It will be acting as a distant client to the local development group, comprising architect, school users and sometimes the building contractor. Whilst almost every national system promotes de-centralisation where each new school project is controlled and developed at local level, key strategic decisions will be set out and pre-determined by central government. The user clients who will be consulted during design development may have unique aspirations; in reality they will be working within the framework of tight planning and technical constraints.
Often this guidance is conflicting, for example the need for schools to be open to the community, yet at the same time secure and safe for the children using them. Many new early years facilities currently being developed within the UK and Germany include adult training rooms, adjacent to children’s activity areas. Schools will need to be fully accessible to wheelchair users, however, a single-storey building, the most practical in that respect, will be less economical than a multi-storey building, particularly when the size of the site is restricted. This kind of tension runs through much of the guidance produced by central government.
As with any generic directive, it is impossible to take account of local site and community-related variables when designing a building as inherently complex as a new school. So whilst it is helpful to discuss plan types, it can become mischievous and in certain situations confusing. Nevertheless it is useful to be aware of key spatial design criteria and to discuss the main design opportunities which will contribute towards a successful and distinctive learning environment.
Modern school buildings cover a broad spectrum of layouts, some with free and open-plan forms, similar to the modern office, with a predominantly open-plan arrangement. However, the majority have traditional closed cellular structures, with the basic teaching space a classroom, providing lessons for groupings between 14 and 30 pupils. The classroom will either be a standard room for general teaching, acting as a secure homebase for a single age group of children, as is the case with most elementary schools for children up to the age of 11. Alternatively, the classroom may be subject-related, with distinct areas of the building for dedicated subject areas such as humanities, arts and design, science and technology, sports and drama.
Subject specific classrooms will be the most common arrangement for secondary schools, since most subjects studied at this level will require specialist facilities to a greater or lesser extent, such as language laboratories, acoustically insulated music rooms and indoor sports halls. Today all of these subject specific classrooms will have integrated ICT (information and communications technology) and sometimes a range of smaller seminar rooms for group or individual tuition. Lots of storage will be required, not just for student and staff belongings, but also for teaching resources. The school will need to have staff facilities, for study and relaxation; these rooms will usually be grouped together and out of bounds to students, to promote a collegiate spirit and perhaps to give teachers some respite from the ‘chalk face.’ In addition there will be whole school dining/cafe and refreshment areas, which will provide a full catering service. The school will comprise a main entrance or reception area, a main hall for assemblies (although it may double as a sports, drama or dining room), a library and safe, hygienic toilet and washroom areas for the use of students and staff, strategically positioned throughout the building.
These rooms will be the basic schedule of accommodation, and the architects will bring their planning skills to bear and organise the schedule in the most efficient and aesthetically pleasing form. Often the planning will be extremely complicated, with room and area relationships set out within a 300-room brief. It should not be allowed to dominate the design development as the sheer joy of architecture is of fundamental importance too. However, whilst the location of storage in relation to teaching areas may seem like a secondary issue when discussing exciting architectural concepts, if it is in the wrong position, the subsequent generation of teachers who have to use the building will not thank you.
Circulation
Beyond this functionally specific area schedule, there will be the internal circulation areas which link individual rooms or subject departments. Circulation is not merely a function of teaching; it is the space between, where students will spend much of their time outside the classroom as they move around the campus between lessons. These circulation areas will often be described as ‘break-out spaces,’ or ‘covered streets’ in order to invest them with a positive aura. Poorly designed circulation can make movement around the building difficult and even facilitate bullying. Generous well-designed circulation will promote a positive ethos and make sense of the building as a coherent public institution. Circulation should never be merely conceived of as a corridor. It is a critical dimension where good design can make a real difference to spatial quality. The cynical observer might note that since the tight constraints of the normal school brief allow architects little scope for fantasy and imagination, spatial quality usually manifests itself in the concept and design of the intermediate zones.
Plan types
In the UK government’s Building Bulletin 95, generic plan types are proposed for secondary and primary schools (Schools for the Future – Designs for Learning Communities, Building Bulletin 95, Department for Education and Skills, 2002, p. 54, www.teachernet.gov.uk/schoolbuildings). In reality these have little to say about the rich language of architecture, rather they treat school design as a slightly simplistic two-dimensional diagram. Nevertheless, they help to rationalise the various strategic approaches in a systematic way, which is easy to communicate at an early stage of the design. In this respect they have value within the framework of a broader conceptual discussion with end users, parents and school governors, when consulting during the design development stages.
Early years buildings are different from schools or at least they should be. They must relate to the smaller scales of young children with the emphasis on learning through play as the essential aspect of the curriculum, which inevitably makes them distinct and very special environments in their own right. Whilst age-related groupings might be the basic organising principles for many daycare facilities, the ethos that children at this age are not there for formal education must shine through.
In terms of secondary schools, three plan types can be distinguished. Firstly, the street plan, secondly, the campus plan and thirdly, linked pavilions. The ‘street plan’ is based on a main linear volume, which might be two or three storeys high and covered over with a translucent roof. The main street may have subsidiary streets, or in order to extend the metaphor, what might be described as ‘lanes’ which run at right angles off the main street. The street provides a focus for the school community as a whole and acts as an internal recreation area, with cafés and shops running inside. Whilst reminiscent of the shopping mall, this concept can be used to develop an economical three- or four-storey building which will be easy to adapt and extend at a later date. An example is the Jo Richardson Community School.
The so-called campus plan adopts the language of the suburban university, with individual buildings set within a green landscape, with circulation predominantly outside in the fresh air. The school is seen as a semi-autonomous series of buildings, which may be dedicated to particular subject areas. In theory each block can be different so that a degree of variety becomes part of the architectural language. Each building can operate as an individual year or house base, and one or more can be opened outside of school hours, such as a sports building for community use. The downside is that different areas can be far apart. It may take time to get around, a problem when students change lessons. Also it may be more suitable to sunny climates, for obvious reasons. An example is the Feather River Academy, which is a special school that benefits from the idea of individual smaller scale units for special groups of students, which are deliberately detached from each other.
The third plan type cited, which is clearly a hybrid of the first and second, comprises of classroom blocks surrounding a double-height central space which is covered over by a semi-translucent roof. Larger spaces are formed as separate blocks, linked but not necessarily attached to the main central space. An example of this would be Nærum Amtsgymnasium near Copenhagen in Denmark. The advantages of this are that each block can reflect a faculty or school within a school idea, so for example a different colour of cladding panel provides a subtle but very legible organising devise avoiding too much fragmentation. In addition, the central space can form a shared resource area, easily accessed by surrounding spaces. This may result in a slightly corporate image relying on transparency and open planning to get light into the inherently deep-plan arrangements.
As far as the primary school typologies are concerned, Building Bulletin 95 firstly identifies a deep-plan form with classrooms and resource areas on each side of a circulation route, with the main hall positioned centrally. The linear plan has classrooms on one side of a circulation route with support spaces on the other side. The hall and entrance are usually at one end of the classroom run. With classrooms all orientated in one direction, it is a fluid and environmentally effective arrangement. However, it is going to be less economical than an arrangement with classrooms at both sides of the central space. This is the final primary school type and is described as the ‘deep linear plan.’ Here classroom bases are on two sides of a circulation/resource area. Main hall and entrance are located at one or both ends.
The need for rationalisation of this type disguises the complexity of designing for education in the 21st century. Even trying to categorise a school in this way may reduce its richness as an organisation, which is responding to a unique set of local influences. A good example is the work of Günter Behnisch, particularly in his secondary school Auf dem Schäfersfeld in Lorch (1973) which is characterised by dynamic free forms and essential quality of openness, whilst retaining the basic classroom form. It is a creative novelty, defeating typologies, yet it has influenced a subsequent generation of school builders with its theme of expressive individualism.
Perhaps the most important factor to bear in mind is that the diagnosis for most school sites will incorporate existing buildings, for example the Burr Elementary School or the Packer Collegiate Institute, which is an amalgamation of five loosely connected historical buildings dating back to 1854. In a situation like this, the correct diagnosis will spring from the most creative yet cost effective response to a given situation for which generic advise will be largely irrelevant. It is clear that spatial quality emerges as a direct reaction to the site problems to which the architect is responding. As with any great architecture, it is as much the juxtaposition of beautiful materials, nice to the touch and good to look at, which are as fundamental as the correct technical specification for light, space and acoustics.
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Originally published in: Mark Dudek, Schools and Kindergartens: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2015.