Designed for learning

A mini-invasion of London by Danish architects took place earlier this month, for a two-day event about school design. A mixed audience of UK clients and architects were treated to a series of presentations by leading designers, including World Architecture Festival judges Kim Nielsen and Morten Schmidt; as always happens when architects meet, any potential commercial rivalries were soon subsumed by discussion about the multiple issues affecting education architecture.

Flitting between presentations, my general impression was that Danish architectural culture seemed to be aimed at producing desired outcomes for users; by contrast, the UK is still grappling with the implications of the Private Finance Initiative and its procurement implications – that is to say more about building product than educational outcomes. The importance given to generous volumes and natural light was in contrast to the trend towards cheaper, and therefore meaner, schools here.

I recently chaired an Architects’ Journal conference on city academies, held in the impressive surroundings of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris’ Westminster Academy; unfortunately, we were told( more than once) it would be difficult to envisage the sort of central atrium enjoyed at Westminster in the next wave of academy schools because the new financial regime would not allow for this.

One can only hope that sense prevails, but it wouldn’t surprise me, because one of the characteristics of British culture is the desire to divide everything into first or second class, or even third class if possible. It doesn’t matter if is stamps, railway carriages or schools: we now have to regard the first wave of city academies as Formula 1 architecture, too good (expensive) to be replicated in other locations, who will just have to make do with something worse.

When the UK Treasury redeveloped itself using the PFI mechanism, it ended up working with a leading developer and a leading architect, Stuart Lipton and Norman Foster. If you are a small borough up north you don’t get the same team. Of course city academies themselves are an example of the desire to have first class schools, as opposed to what Tony Blair’s former mouthpiece, Alistair Campbell, described as ‘bog standard comprehensives’. This cynical description is in marked contrast to the aspirations of new Labout, which has a good record on school-building and education generally.

Nevertheless, the, last thing schoolchildren need is second-class facilities: as the least powerful of all building user groups, we have particular responsibilities towards them, especially given the amount of time they will spend in the architecture we create. Schools are places where, for the first time, children experience environments ranging from the individual learning workstations to (hopefully) generous collective spaces; they experience hierarchy and freedom, control and play, learning and enjoyment sometimes simultaneously. They experience nature, furniture and digital equipment; do we really want those experiences to be determined by a belief that chairs should be procured on the basis of price and replacement cost, rather than ergonomics and robustness?

Schools are where children experience what society thinks about them, not least through the architecture it places them in, and it is of course the place where, at best, they will experience the stimulating world of three dimensional space, and at worst the numbing effects of narrow corridors and too-low suspended ceilings.