Room to Learn
questions and strategies in designing learning environments
Machine shop class, Washington DC, ca. 1899. Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston.
Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative
Room to Learn
questions and strategies in designing learning environments
Austin Sakong, AIA, LEED GA, Associate, FXCollaborative
Writing in the Winter 1969 Issue of the Harvard Educational Review, James Ackerman observed, “In the Middle Ages, colleges like those at Oxford looked like monasteries because the Establishment was theocratic; today, our high schools look like factories and regiment students like the labor force because the Establishment is commercial and industrial.”1 The fact that Ackerman wrote this in 1969, a watershed moment in history that saw irreparable erosions to its own political and cultural “establishments,” surely roots his two-pronged point: that the designs of schools are bound to the societal structures they serve, and that those structures will continue to change. “Architecture,” Ackerman wrote, “is the
physical form of social institutions.” 2 This simple insight, written during a period of rapid societal change and turmoil, resonates today as much as it did then, as we again experience precipitous changes in our economic, ecological, and social systems. It provides us with an opportunity to ask: what characterizes our establishments today, and how does that affect the physical form of our learning institutions? What evolutions in today’s post-Fordist, information-age society are being reflected, if they are being reflected at all, in the design of our schools? To address these questions, it is useful to remember why schools look the way they do now—and in fact, Ackerman’s comparison of high schools to
factories is neither merely facile nor entirely outdated. As Peter Lippman documents in Evidence-Based Design of Elementary and Secondary Schools, the widespread transition from early 19th century one-room schoolhouses to larger public schools was driven largely by the Second Industrial Revolution. The urgent need for skilled labor, dovetailing with reform movements calling for free public education, as well as the growth of industrial cities, transformed the landscape of American education from that of disaggregated local schools towards a coordinated national endeavor to efficiently educate large numbers of students according to common standards.3 Schools were needed to fill factories;
1 Ackerman, James. “Listening to Architecture” Harvard Educational Review; December 1969, Vol 39, No. 4. 2 Ibid. 3 Lippman, Peter C. “Evidence-Based Design of Elementary and Secondary Schools” John Wiley & Sons, Inc; 2010.
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Typical mid-19th century school, floor plan.3
20th century windowless school, floor plan.3
Crow Island School, 1940, floor plan. Architect: Perkins, Wheeler & Will
20th century open school, floor plan.3
Figure 1
Schools in plan, through history. (classroom spaces highlighted)
and after all, what better model than the factory itself to efficiently produce a consistent and well-trained workforce, at a large enough scale to meet the demands of a new economy?
Duke School, 2009, floor plan. Architect: Fielding Nair International / DTW Architects
Based on this model, many 19th century classrooms were simply large halls with hundreds of students, of all different ages, seated on long benches, and assigned to a single teacher with a few aides. By the mid19th century, these halls evolved to what we would more easily recognize as schools today: different divisions
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as art, music, and athletics. Finally, the 20th century gave rise to a number of pedagogically-driven spatial experiments, from schools that eliminated classrooms altogether in favor of completely open floor plans, to those with completely enclosed and windowless classrooms intended to block out any potential distractions, to those with clusters of classrooms organized around flexible common spaces.4 The evolutionary history of school design, from the 1800s through today, if nothing else, has been a continuous interrogatory into how students can best learn in their given environments (Figure 1).
An interior courtyard becomes a teaching space and vertical connector between divisions.
emerged to accommodate different age groups; class sizes were reduced to hold 30-40 students each; classrooms were organized around efficient double-loaded corridors; and new spaces were implemented to facilitate new curricular additions, such
And from this long interrogatory, certain tropes begin to emerge, all in varying manifestations, but all constituting consciously designed elements of the learning environment. The design of furniture, for example, demonstrates how, at even the smallest scale, design can impact learning; the long wooden 19th century bench bolted to the floor, as well as today’s caster-fitted mobile chair, both speak to learning modalities relevant to their respective eras and pedagogies. The degree of the classroom’s porosity, too, has been the subject of constant investigation. The ‘open air school movement’ of the 1930s emphasized access to light and air;5 a number of schools in the 1960s were built with few, if any at all, windows to the outside;6 while the ‘open classroom movement’, also of the
4 Ibid. 5 Baker, Lindsay. “A History of School Design and its Indoor Environmental Standards, 1900 to Today” National Institute of Building Sciences; January 2012. 6 Ibid. 7 Marks, Judy. “The Educational Facilities Laboratories (EFL): A History” National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities, 2001.
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1960s, proposed the elimination of all interior walls and partitions.7 Other tropes include circulation, flexibility, and efficiency. In the end, these tropes can be loosely organized as a series of design questions operating at three distinct, but nested, scales: the scale of the classroom, the scale of the school, and the scale of the community. At the scale of the individual classroom, how can the furnishing and arrangement of the room itself best facilitate a student’s ability to learn? At the scale of the school, how can the physical organization of the school best encompass all that the student needs for a comprehensive education? And, finally, at the scale of the community, how can schools best ensure that the student’s education is relevant to the needs of the neighborhood, city, and/or global community that awaits them? One measure of an education’s relevance, of course, is its congruity to the economy; that is, jobs. And according to research published by McKinsey Quarterly, those jobs have dramatically evolved since the early 20th century, from being primarily transformational to transactional; that is, from jobs involved in transforming raw materials into finished goods, to jobs involved in conducting complex interactions using high levels of skills, knowledge, and judgement.8 Our contemporary workforce can no longer rely solely on
the ability to absorb knowledge and execute well-defined tasks, and neither can our students. Traditional productoriented companies are reorganizing to become project-oriented platforms, operating across markets through an ecosystem of multiple business organizations.9 Preparing students to join this workforce will entail cultivating their ability to thrive in such ecosystems, and construct new knowledge within collaborative and multidisciplinary settings. So to return to James Ackerman, and that elliptical symmetry between architecture and establishments: what is abundantly clear is that in most ways, contemporary life—which can be characterized by disruption, interaction, diversity, automation, digitization, and atomization—has long since moved on from the Industrial Revolution. Whether the architecture of our schools has likewise moved on, perhaps, is less clear. What follows are a series of scalar strategies and questions that probe how we can better reflect our society, and better align the design of our learning spaces —through physical form—to the aspirations of our learning institutions.
The Classroom In a way, the most irreducible module of learning space has always been the classroom: a defined space in which an instructor engages a group of students. The method of that engagement, often referred to as a learning modality (or teaching
7 Marks, Judy. “The Educational Facilities Laboratories (EFL): A History” National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities, 2001. 8 Johnson, Bradford C; Manyika, James M.; Yee, Lareina A. “The next revolution in interactions” McKinsey Quarterly; November 2005. 9 Bughin, Jaques; Lund, Susan; Remes, Jaana. “Rethinking work in the digital age” McKinsey Quarterly; October 2016.
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Figure 2
University Lecture, by Laurentius de Voltolina.
modality), is what determines the design needs of a classroom. A well-known 14th century illustration (Figure 2) demonstrates one deeply familiar learning modality, and serves as a useful reminder that, as much as things have changed, they’ve also remained the same: a “sage on stage� fixed at the front of the room dispenses knowledge to a group of passive listeners, several of whom are chatting with each other or outright
napping. As familiar as this model is, are its many criticisms: that the static lecture too often fails to engage students; that students learn best when doing something, and not just hearing about it; that developing brains often absorb information better when visual and auditory inputs are accompanied by tactile and haptic inputs. These criticisms are especially acute today, when information is a readily available commodity, as useful (or useless) from a Google search as it is from an instructor.
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A library encourages participation with all surfaces, from all ages, at all scales. Photo © Chris Cooper
Another learning modality, which has become increasingly common in recent years, eschews the “sage on stage” in favor of a “guide on the side.” In this model, the instructor is not fixed at a teaching wall, but mobile throughout the classroom, individually engaging each student in completing individual projects and tasks, or facilitating student-led discussions and explorations in lieu of lectures. There may be several teaching walls, or none at all; and instead of being seated at rows of forward-facing desks, students are often clustered around tables in groups of four to six. The gaining popularity of
this modality, known as “active learning,” has been closely associated with a heightened focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) subjects. According to a 2014 study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, students in active learning environments receive higher grades, and are far less likely to fail, in STEM subjects: "The impact of these data should be like the Surgeon General's report on ‘Smoking and Health’ in 1964—they should put to rest any debate about whether active learning is more effective than lecturing."10 But this, too, has its criticisms. In a 2015 New York Times Op-Ed, journalist and educator Molly Worthen argued against “an attempt to
10 Freeman, Scott; Eddy, Sarah L.; McDonough, Miles; Smith, Michelle K.; Okoroafor, Nnadozie; Jordt, Hannah; Wenderoth, Mary Pat. “Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; June 2014.
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further assimilate history, philosophy, literature and their sister disciplines to the goals and methods of the hard sciences—fields whose stars are rising in the eyes of administrators, politicians and higher-education entrepreneurs.”11 In teaching the humanities, she argues, there is a value in the lecture format that isn’t possible to retrieve through active learning: Absorbing a long, complex argument is hard work, requiring students to synthesize, organize and react as they listen. In our time, when any reading assignment longer than a Facebook post seems ponderous, students have little experience doing this. Some research suggests that minority and low-income students struggle even more. But if we abandon the lecture format because students may find it difficult, we do them a disservice. Moreover, we capitulate to the worst features of the customer-service mentality that has seeped into the university from the business world. The solution, instead, is to teach those students how to gain all a great lecture course has to give them.12 If this spectrum of modalities reveals anything, it is surely not the need to determine how one solution is better than any other, but the need to accept and support the full breadth of that very spectrum. While pedagogy relies on specific spatial configurations to be effective, those configurations should not then limit or predetermine
that pedagogy. Rather, they should merely provide enough built-in flexibility to allow each instructor to experiment with, adjust, and invent his or her own teaching modality according to student needs, the subjects at hand, and the evolving role of technology in the classroom. In short, the design of a classroom should enable the instructor to question the nature of that classroom: What defines a classroom, and what, and who, should go in it? How do its available permutations enable different teaching modalities? In cases like ‘flipped’ classrooms, where lectures can be downloaded at home so that school time is reserved for one-to-one interactions, does the traditional size and scale of a classroom still make sense? Ultimately, these are design questions that empower pedagogical ones, and both are centered on the impacts of how a classroom’s fundamentals and furnishings are designed. Fundamentals Shaping a classroom begins, well, with its shape: its dimensions and proportions, in both plan and section. For example, high ceilings can help draw natural light deep into a room, but a ceiling that’s too high or too hard can create unmanageable acoustics or an inappropriate scale. Traditional rectangular classrooms can be ideal for lecture-style presentations, but also elongates the distance between the ‘front’ and ‘back’ of the room; on the other hand, square classrooms can
11 Worthen, Molly. “Lecture Me. Really.” The New York Times; October 17 2015. 12 Ibid.
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be ideal for seminar-style sessions (like the renowned Harkness method, for example), but are less suited for large class sizes. The area of square feet allotted per student can also impact flexibility; for example, while a standard lecture format requires only about 10-15 SF per student, active learning and group work can require anywhere between 35 SF to 50 SF. In early childhood education, even more can be required: according to a 2003 study from France which measured students’ cortisol levels as biological markers of stress, a minimum of 5 square meters (about 54 SF) was found to be necessary to maintain reduced levels of stress in toddlers between 18 to 40 months old.13 Consider, also, the classroom’s boundaries. Typically, a classroom is enclosed with solid walls, intended to keep students, and their undistracted focus, inside and attending to the lesson at hand. Sight lines are blunted, acoustics are modulated, and students are seated. But in his book How We Learn, Benedict Carey argues that an essential part of how the human brain operates is through foraging for valuable information while in motion. Learning and problem solving are not linear processes for acquiring and applying information; rather, they require a constant synthesis of unexpected linkages and inspiration.14 By building in an adjustable degree of porosity to its boundaries, a classroom can fold in the presence
of new sights and sounds—whether they are other learning activities, glimpses of students passing by, or even just the natural environment outside—which can play an important role in providing positive forms of “distractions.” A porous classroom can help merge planned lessons with unplanned discoveries. By allowing students to forage for their own new connections and relationships between the materials within and outside the classroom, instructors are able to give them a sense of ownership over their learning and maximize their capacities for creative discourse. And in so doing, that irreducible module of learning, which has always existed at the scale of the classroom, can shift to the scale of the individual student. Porosity as a concept can take any number of forms, whether through visually transparent walls or literally no walls at all (Figure 3). But as many possibilities as there are, there are also a number of associated design challenges. For example, some students require longer periods of visual and acoustic focus than others, and the instructor needs the ability to limit and control the presence of potentially negative distractions according individual student needs. Security is another concern; lock-down drills are an increasingly common part of student life, and protocols must be established to protect students in the event of an intruder. Finally, building codes are often an associated
13 Legendre, Alain. “Environmental Features Influencing Toddlers’ Bioemotional Reactions in Day Care Centers.” Environment and Behavior; Vol. 35, Issue 4, 2003. 14 Carey, Benedict. “How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens” Random House; 2014.
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challenge with increased porosity, particularly in older or existing school buildings: fire rating requirements, occupancy load tables, and public assembly requirements are often useful in designing for traditional learning modalities, but are often costly and complex impediments to implementing new ones. Furnishings As critical as those elements which delineate the boundaries of a classroom, are all those things found inside it. For example, because furniture most immediately defines the space of each student, designing to flexible furniture is an essential part of designing multimodal classrooms. Chairs and tables should allow for easy movement, and should enable both individual and collective arrangements as needed. A good example is Steelcase’s Node Chair; its swivel seat allows the individual student to easily shift focus and direction in place, and its wheel casters and writing surface allow students to cluster together in groups of two to four, or even larger groups when used with tables. Another example is the Shapes Desk by Balt; its curvilinear geometry can serve as a standalone single desk, or nest together in multiple group configurations (Figure 4). In addition to furniture, the classroom also requires infrastructure. The need for robust infrastructure in a classroom isn’t limited to having a state-of-the-art Smart Board, which is ultimately an
example of technological infrastructure in support of what students can see and hear (Figure 5). The classroom should also support what students can build, cut, smell, pour, mix, weld, dissect, or even cook. Such infrastructure can include drop-down electrical cord reels dispersed throughout the classroom ceiling, multiple wet sinks around the classroom perimeter, and even kitchen appliances like stoves and refrigerators. If it holds true that the roles of today’s students in the future workforce will depend on their ability to formulate new questions and hypotheses based on direct experiences rather than received information, then their education will need to engage all their senses and skills, supported by spaces that can facilitate a diverse array of hands-on projects. The design challenges associated with ensuring adequate infrastructural accommodations are a kind of paradox: on the one hand, the intent is to maximize flexibility for the range of an instructor’s lesson plans; on the other hand, by definition, infrastructural elements are costly and fixed, built into the fabric of the building and unlikely to move. Storage elements like cabinets, counters, and shelves are often impractical or impossible to re-arrange; and the more such storage is needed, the less flexible the room becomes. Or to take another example, the installed location of a Smart Board often becomes the de facto teaching wall, and can immediately limit the
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Figure 4
Left: Node Chair by Steelcase. Images courtesy of Steelcase. Right: Shapes Desk by Balt. Images courtesy of Balt.
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range of teaching modalities. In the end, the fungibility of a space is often in direct conflict with its utility. The most flexible space may be the least useful, and what’s so useful for one teacher, may precisely be what makes it unusable for another. The design of each classroom, then, must strike a balance, in consideration of the needs of each individual school, curriculum, and teacher.
The School By transforming the space of the classroom to accommodate a diversity of learning modalities, from traditional static spaces with passive learning to dynamic spaces with active learning, teachers are able to customize their lesson plans according to the needs and pace of each individual student; and in so doing, students are given individual agency and empowerment in shaping their own education. The ways in which a learning environment facilitates this individual agency should extend beyond the scale of each classroom, to the scale of the overall school. The traditional “cells and bells” school organization, with long doubleloaded corridors neatly dividing rows of classrooms (cells), is a physical embodiment of the factory metaphor in which the consistency and predictability of the school anticipates the consistency and predictability of its students—and their future work environment. But in a model in which newly empowered students are seen
not as merely receiving knowledge but also constructing it, not just as products of an education system but as that system’s co-innovators, the school’s learning spaces must be as diverse and dynamic as its students. Studies such as Michael Horn and Heather Staker’s Blended argue for schools to be conceived not as an eggcrate of classrooms based on subject or grade level, but as a system of variously scaled “technology-rich” stations based on different modalities and individual progress. One station might be for direct instruction with fifteen students, another might be a group project space for two or three students, and yet another might be a central computer lab for a hundred students; each student moves from one station to another on a series of rotations, constantly engaging both physical and digital spaces and resources.15 Fully exploring the potential of this model would shift school design dramatically away from “cells and bells.” After all, as the authors of Blended note, “Who wants to be the school district that builds the last twentieth-century building?”16 The station model proposed in Blended is only one alternative to the traditional school design model. Practitioners such as Prakash Nair and Bruce Jilk, for example, have written and built a substantive body of work in pursuit of learning spaces more closely aligned with progressive pedagogical thinking.
15 Horn, Michael B. and Staker, Heather. “Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools” Jossey-Bass 2015. 16 Ibid.
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Figure 5
Technological infrastructure connects students to the classroom and the outside world.
Nair has advocated for retiring the term ‘classroom’ altogether, favoring concepts like ‘learning studios’ or ‘learning suites’ in order to place greater emphasis on integration over direct instruction alone.17 Jilk offers another radical model, based on what he has called “a montage of gaps:”
[I]n moving from considering learners as passive recipients to active players in their learning experience, the objective becomes one of engaging them in their situation (which includes the environment). To do this they must also become authors of their environment. Authority becomes shared between the producer (architect) and the consumer (learner). This is consistent with the purpose of developing creative
17 Nair, Prakash. “The Classroom is Obsolete” Education Week, July 2011.
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learners. Rather than an environment where all actions are predetermined, the goal is a setting that engages the learner by a design that requires them to participate in that environment. These places are incomplete without the user’s involvement. These building are not experienced all at once, but rather piece by piece, in moments separated by gaps in space, time, and climate. It is these gaps or relationships that become the focus of the design. This strategy of designing relationships, such that it requires the creative engagement of the user to complete the setting, has recently been identified as the ‘Montage of Gaps’. A montage is a composite of juxtaposed elements. In this design approach these elements are the gaps of space, time, and climate.18 What emerges from all these studies, in the end, are two essential focal points to the design of any twentyfirst century school: access and adjacencies. Access can be simply defined as the circulatory flow of students between and through learning spaces, and adjacencies as the programmatic logic of how those spaces are organized relative to one another. Access If the primary argument for the traditional double-loaded corridor is its efficiency in minimizing non-learning spaces, then the logical question that
follows is, Can they be eliminated altogether? How would circulation in a school work if every space became a learning space (Figure 6)? If learning weren’t limited to the boundaries of the classroom, the school could provide students, and their foraging brains, with learning opportunities even as they circulate throughout it. Corridors could be strategically widened, attenuated, and/or enhanced to accommodate breakout spaces, open study commons, tech bars, social spaces, and even assembly spaces. Circulation itself could thus become curricular extensions of the classroom, and vice versa. A broad diversity of different kinds of interactions at different scales would acknowledge the inherently interconnected nature of knowledge, and become an important part of preparing students for complex transactions between people, disciplines, and economies. In a way, the problem with the traditional corridor may not be that it takes up too much space, but, properly leveraged, not enough of it (Figure 7). The vertical mirror to the horizontal corridor is the stair core, which is typically a lightless, concreteencased column of vertical circulation throughout the school. Its requirements for fire separation and egress means it occupies as minimal a footprint as possible, both spatially and pedagogically. But like corridors, stairs are circulating devices capable
18 Jilk, Bruce A. “Place making and change in learning environments” Children’s Spaces edited by Dudek, Mark. Architectural Press, 2005.
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A NEW A NEW PLAN PLAN Figure 6
Every space becomes a learning space, even outside the classroom.
Figure 7
EXISTING CONDITIONS EXISTING CONDITIONS
The existing plan is currently over-stuffed and overThe existing plan is currently over-stuffed and overscheduled. The building is overly rigid, while lacking clear scheduled. The building is overly rigid, while lacking clear circulation, orientation to daylight and breathing room. circulation, orientation to daylight and breathing room.
UNDERLYING STRUCTURE UNDERLYING STRUCTURE
PROPOSED FLOOR PROPOSED PLAN FLOOR PLAN
Working underlying within grid themakes underlying an entirely grid makes new floor an entirely plan new floor plan However, removing all non-structural partitions reveals a Working within the However, removing all non-structural partitions reveals a The perimeter possible. is The linedperimeter with consistent is linedbut with flexible consistent rooms. but flexible rooms. straight-forward 28’x28’ structural column grid, as well as possible. a straight-forward 28’x28’ structural column grid, as well as a The center is marked The center by soft, is organic markedforms. by soft, The organic spaces forms. between The spaces between limited number of cores that can remain intact. limited number of cores that can remain intact. them become multi-purpose them become breakout multi-purpose spaces.breakout spaces.
New plan strategies diagram the conversion of a traditional "cells and bells" school into a network of learning spaces at all scales, connected by commons spaces, breakout areas, study lounges, and 'neighborhood' centers.
of not just moving students between learning spaces, but also connecting and gathering students by creating its own learning spaces. Graceful diagonal connections between floors often provide unexpected visual and pedagogical linkages, and can help students map their own personal spatial and educational trajectories (Figures 8 & 9).
REFINED FLOORREFINED PLAN FLOOR PLAN
With the perimeter With ‘cracked the perimeter open’, circulation ‘cracked open’, is clarified circulation and is clarified and oriented towardsoriented light andtowards views. Making light and circulation views. Making spaces circulation spaces wide enough for wide multi-purpose enough for programs multi-purpose meansprograms corridors means are corridors are almost eliminated, almost and every eliminated, space—whether and every space—whether in or outside the in or outside the classroom—becomes classroom—becomes a learning space.a learning space.
Adjacencies Just as no single design solution can accommodate the learning needs of every student, there is no formula that will accommodate the teaching needs of every school. The programmatic organization of each school should reflect and enhance its unique culture (Figure 10). How might the design, placement, and
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Figure 8
Left: In section, stacks of flat space are connected through unexpected diagonal linkages in section. Right: In plan, classroom silos and corridors break open and collaborate.
ENED RONMENT ENVIRONMENT
ws! nt’sAlearning student’s environment learning environment should should ature, the city, life nature, and light. life and light.
UNIS IS A UNIS POROUS IS AENVIRONMENT POROUS ENVIRONMENT
ClassroomClassroom adjacencies adjacencies should reflect should the reflect interconnected the interconnected nature of knowledge. nature of knowledge. A student’sAlearning student’s environment learning environment should should encourageencourage unexpected unexpected linkages, collaborations linkages, collaborations and relationships. and relationships.
UNIS IS A UNIS POROUS IS AENVIRONMENT POROUS ENVIRONMENT
ClassroomClassroom adjacencies adjacencies should reflect should the reflect interconnected the interconnected nature of knowledge. nature of knowledge. A student’sA learning student’senvironment learning environment should should encourageencourage unexpected unexpected linkages, collaborations linkages, collaborations and relationships. and relationships.
Figure 9
An open forum anchors a suite of language classrooms, encouraging debate and plurality.
visibility of programs like cafeterias and gymnasiums speak to a school’s focus on health and wellness? How might the adjacencies between
a library and a media lab advance a school’s goal of re-inventing the role of libraries in schools? How might the programming of a forum between language classrooms celebrate a school’s international student body? A school with an emphasis on STEM
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Reorganizing already existing programs allows science and maker tech spaces to become the 'heart' of a school.
programs, for example, could design contiguities between computer labs and chemistry labs. A school known for its arts programs might choose to place a performing arts theater in its geographic center, with equal access to classrooms and green rooms alike. These adjacencies could in turn encourage a plurality of related associations and personal discoveries, which could then be contributed
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to each class they attend and each conversation they have along the way. As it is at the scale of a classroom, the indispensable feature of learning at the scale of the school is to encourage students to claim responsibility and ownership in shaping their own education. The curricular expanse of an education—the range of subjects taught, the necessary milestones passed—may largely be in the hands of the school’s educators. But designing the bridge which can span that expanse—interrelating those subjects, gleaning meaning from those milestones—can be a collaborative
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work, each unique design with its own distinct attributes and authenticity, co-signed by both educator and student, and foundationally supported by their learning environment.
Conclusion: The Community A student’s transition from inside the learning environment to the community outside it doesn’t occur on the single event of graduation day, but over the course of a gradual and daily interface. And the design of that interface—which can include everything from the framed window through which students literally see the world outside, to the assembly space hosting a local community board meeting—can speak to the school’s relationship to its various contexts. These contexts are multiple, and will depend on each school; an urban school will necessitate designing its relationship to its urban context (street life and pedestrian flow, for example) (Figures 11 & 12), or an arts school may require designing its relationship to its institutional context (nearby museums or performance halls, for example). But if a fundamental role of any school is to prepare its students to navigate the shifting landscape of the global economy, one common thread shared by all schools will be the economic context awaiting their students. As famously noted by former Secretary of Education Richard Riley, “We are currently preparing students
Figure 11
Circulating through an urban campus inscribes learning spaces into public spaces, and vice versa.
for jobs that don’t yet exist, that will use technologies that have yet to be invented, to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.” The World Economic Forum estimates that “65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist.”19 To add
19 “Executive Summary: The Future of Jobs and Skills” World Economic Forum, January 2016.
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Figure 12
A university's 'student landscape' includes interior and exterior spaces, cafes and classrooms, art galleries and public monuments.
to this, our future economic context isn’t just impossible to forecast, but it’s accelerating as well. According to the US Department of Labor, today’s students will have on average 10-14 jobs before they turn 38. So in a way, a hallmark of designing to today’s establishment (to return to Ackerman’s term) will not necessarily be in our ability to predict the future, but in our ability to embody, facilitate, and constantly adapt to the dynamic changes by which we are today, if asymptotically, approaching that
future. In schools, this will not only mean creating flexibility within the school, but remaining responsive to its community through a continuous and open-ended interface. An elementary school may choose to shape its curriculum around maker tech and STEM subjects, and simply require spaces to support those subjects. A university business school may choose to model its spaces on contemporary open-office or shared working environments, and regularly invite professionals outside academia to interact with students. But in both cases, the school and its community become interdependent resources to each other; each are permeably
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A college is diagrammed as an ecosystem of institutions and departments.
CONFERENCE
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ATHENA
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ACADEMIC TEACHING
GRAND ENTRY
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Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative
PLAN DIAGRAM
TEACHING / EVENT
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ACTIVE LEARNING
ACADEMIC
BCRW
ACADEMIC
BCIT
ACTIVE LEARNING
TEACHING
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ACTIVE LEARNING
ACADEMIC
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ACTIVE LEARNING
ATHENA
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ACTIVE LEARNING
LAWN LEVEL CLAREMONT ST
TEACHING AND LEARNING CENTER
EVENT / CONFERENCE
LAWN LEVEL CLAREMONT ST
LAWN LEVEL EVENT / CONFERENCE
A college library as a programmatic bridge spanning multiple urban and pedagogical contexts.
defined and infuses the other with innovation, expertise, and newly constructed knowledge. In this sense, the school need not be just a starting point for a student in a linear process that ends in a professional laboratory or office. Rather, the interface between the research and innovations of the academic sphere, and the capital and expertise of the economic sphere, could become constantly symbiotic and dynamic. For example, New York City universities rank second in the nation in total research spending, while the City attracts less than 10% of the nation’s venture capital investment, ranking
19th in the nation when ranked in dollars per capita.20 There is a clear disconnect between New York’s investments in research, and the returns it sees in that research being translated into innovation. Here, it is important to note that recent trends like university-based incubators have now begun to address this disconnect. Startups, often initiated by faculty or recent alums, have begun to receive access to the multidisciplinary research and resources of Universities. There are challenges too: recent research focused on university incubators has found drops in patent quality, licensing income, and heightened competition for resources with other campus efforts.21 What these incubators potentially signal, however, isn’t just an alternative way to germinate ideas and inventions
20 F lorida, Richard. “A Closer Look at the Geography of Venture Capital in the US” CityLab, Feb 23 2016. 21 K olympiris, Christos. “The Effects of Academic Incubators on University Innovation” Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, January 30 2017.
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Room to Learn
to take root in the marketplace. They could also incubate new spaces that exist simply to create meaningful perforations and deformations in the boundaries between learning spaces and their communities. These liminal spaces could be economic, cultural, political, or social resources; they could incubate both future professionals and future students. Whatever form these spaces take, they will constitute an answer to what is fundamentally a design problem. The result will be schools that are fully integrated, both pedagogically and architecturally, into their economic contexts. They will better equip their students to join the workforce, but also empower them to change the societal structures which drive that workforce. These will be schools with room to learn, capable of adapting to the global community they are helping to shape.
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A lower school shaped from both within and without by site-specific climate conditions.
Which returns us, usefully, to the notion of the transformational vs transactional. Rather than seeing schools only as places of transforming raw materials (students) into finished goods (the workforce), they could be re-conceived as operating in a transactional relationship, situated in a multi-faceted ecology of communities, institutions, and economies. And from those transactions, there may emerge schools with entirely new definitions—and designs.
Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative
The school in the city. The city in the school.
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Room to Learn
Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative
Austin Sakong is an Associate of FXCollaborative. Since joining FXCollaborative in 2013, Austin has worked exclusively on projects for K-12 and higher education institutions, with experience in master plans, new construction, and renovations. He has taught architecture studios at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design, and is a Commissioner of the Jersey City Historic Preservation Commission. He has also served as a Board Member of the Harsimus Cove Neighborhood Association in Jersey City, a non-profit community organization which works with the City Administration to address issues of development, public space, quality of life, and zoning. Austin’s drawings have been included in several recent publications, including “A History of Housing in New York City” by Richard Plunz (Columbia University 2016) and “Open City: Existential Urbanity” by Diane Lewis (Charta 2015). He received his Bachelor of Architecture from the Cooper Union, and his Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University. Austin’s practice of architecture is informed by his view that architecture, like literature, is ultimately a humanist pursuit; and that its quality hinges on its ability to articulate meaning, stories, and life.
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