Emerging Trends in School Design

Last week a bunch of Cullinans keen beans attended ‘Shaping the Future: Spaces for Education’ talk at the Geological Society  - part of this season’s ‘Emerging Trends’ series by the Royal Academy.  The speakers were Philip Marsh (drMM), John Whiles (Jestico Whiles), and Simon Allford (AHMM).

In the current era of parent-led grass roots initiatives a wide spectrum of school types is cropping up from Free Schools to Academies and beyond.  The time is ripe to ask: how can school design attitudes evolve to meet these new challenges?

Simon Allford conveyed energy in his interrogation of the problem at hand, calling for designers to reconsider the brief for schools.  He argued that architects should ignore overly specific briefs and instead conceive schools as part of the city fabric, rather than allowing the design to be driven by a programme that changes as often as educational policy.  Allford’s plea for ‘highly bespoke yet inherently adaptable design’ cited the Uffizi Galleries in Florence as an example of a building which goes beyond its brief to form lasting public space.

View of the river Arno framed by the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Piazzale degli Uffizi

Most of the evening covered well publicised past projects such as the Kingsdale Secondary School Sports Hall by drMM which, whilst admirable for its creative use of ETFE and glulam structure, can hardly be considered as an ‘emerging trend’ as it was completed ten years ago.

I left disappointed by the lack of emerging school design philosophies shown, but motivated to continue the debate on the subject (those of us who attended stayed behind for an animated discussion)!  Hopefully others had a similar reaction and will be inspired to join a more focused debate on design for the next generation of schools.  Overseas inspiration is easy to come by - for example, the climate-sensitive and cost-effective DPS Kindergarten School in Bangalore, conceived by architects Kholsa Associates as a prototype school for South India.

Terracotta jaalis and colourful corrugated sheets provide playful shading and a nod towards the vernacular architecture of the region, set within the rigorous framework of a modular concrete typology.  Natural ventilation, light and local materials harmonise in this project, which came top of the education category at the 2013 Inside Festival awards and is a delight to read about.  Could such an approach begin to answer the call for innovative ‘highly bespoke yet inherently adaptable design’ for schools and if so, what would the British equivalent be?

 

 

 

The central courtyard at the DPS Kindergarten

What housing crisis?

On Monday the rising star Shadow Minister of Housing, Emma Reynolds, enthusiastically briefed a full-house at NHBC about emerging Labour Party plans to deal with the housing crisis.  She talked about ‘Build First’ to encourage SMEs to make up the numbers to 200,000 homes a year using smaller public sector sites which they paid for later, hence Build First.  Little definite beyond that as Sir Michael Lyons’ Housing Commission is not due to report till later in the year and the election isn’t till 2015. But she went some way to answer some of the questions raised by James Meek’s excellent review of the recent past ‘Where will we live?’published in the London Review of Books. 

For Reynolds the issues are numbers, affordability and quality, including size, none of which is helped by the Coalition’s ‘Help to Buy’ programme supporting re-mortgaging and houses up to £600k, unaffordable to most first time buyers.  Garden Cities are part of the programme as trailed by the Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls at the NHBC Annual Lunch in November but the question is where?  She batted aside the idea that these would be warmed-up eco-towns but declined to name any locations; the difficulties to be overcome include the free market price of land and the difficulty many Local Authority planners now have finding the necessary resource for strategic planning.

I asked her about this since the Coalition has abolished Regional Planning, encouraged  nimbyism in the South-East through the National Planning Policy Framework and seen the Local Authority planning community decimated by financial cuts; I suggested that, as a result, planners were back to (battling the lawyers with) development control.  In reply to another question she talked about the ‘Right to Grow’ (beyond the Authority’s boundaries) for towns like Stevenage, Luton and Oxford and the ability to swap green belt land.  This is like the expansion of Cambridge redrawing the City boundaries, following extensive community engagement.

She was warmly received, answering most questions confidently but I felt that her reliance on homes ‘being more attractive’ as a means of winning over the nimbies was a tad optimistic!