from Hacker News

Rethinking School Design

by samsolomon on 10/17/24, 5:09 PM with 67 comments

• by giantg2 on 10/17/24, 5:34 PM

  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).

• by spankalee on 10/17/24, 6:27 PM

  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.

• by variaga on 10/17/24, 6:46 PM

  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.

• by jrsdav on 10/17/24, 6:17 PM

  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.

• by potato3732842 on 10/17/24, 7:09 PM

  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.

• by TheOtherHobbes on 10/17/24, 8:21 PM

  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.

• by kjellsbells on 10/17/24, 8:25 PM

  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.

• by nonameiguess on 10/17/24, 7:24 PM

  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.

• by janalsncm on 10/17/24, 7:21 PM

  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.

• by rsolva on 10/17/24, 7:19 PM

  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 :)

• by WalterBright on 10/17/24, 5:31 PM

  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.

• by pcaharrier on 10/17/24, 5:44 PM

  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.

• by _rm on 10/18/24, 4:28 AM

  Seems whenever there's talk about improvement in education and schooling, and demands for yet more funds, everyone very carefully avoids the topic of what's actually important in education.

  Instead it's always about superficial matters like this.

  No, what's actually important is, for student X, 20 years from now, are they living a better life than they would otherwise have, as a result of the education services they received.

  If you just paid attention to that metric, and rebuked every single other thing, the price, speed, and quality of all education would rapidly improve every single year.

  That'd start first and foremost with what people are being taught, followed by a bunch of other important levers, and right at the bottom of the list would be the physical design of the school.

  Sector suffers from an epidemic of bikeshedding.

• by troupo on 10/17/24, 8:20 PM

  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.

• by watwut on 10/18/24, 6:51 AM

  They look like schools that will need a lot of lighting, because they do not have enough windows. Plus they look like shopping centers from inside.

• by henning on 10/17/24, 7:31 PM

  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.

• by NoMoreNicksLeft on 10/17/24, 6:01 PM

  Given the shrinking demographic, it's difficult to see why anyone would bother. Whatever problems schools have, it's not the architecture.

• by nemo44x on 10/17/24, 7:34 PM

  > 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.

• by DowagerDave on 10/17/24, 8:12 PM

  so many rich (mostly white) kids!