Architecture of Pedagogy by SCI-Arc

Architecture of Pedagogy

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Sophie Akoury

Graduate Thesis 2022

Thesis Statement Draft 01 My particular interest with education began with Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he dares to ask: what is the alternative to the banking system of education, and how can this include marginalized populations? The core of shifting this system does indeed lie in teaching and learning methods, but I am curious about the implication of architecture in this process. Perhaps a curriculum and a building can be interwoven in their conception, perhaps a back and forth between a space and a platform is possible.

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I want to explore pedagogy in general through the creation of the school/university/campus itself, in parallel to architectural pedagogy through the representation of it. The site will be a cinematic one, set in a virtual environment. Student body and faculty will be equal participants in this project, and it is through them and their narration that we will explore the spaces. As a a student in the real world mostly and the digital one recently, I cannot but wonder how things could (or should) be. It is inevitably time for a shift in schooling - or maybe for unschooling, and deschooling.

Thesis Statement Draft 02

My thesis is interested in exploring what the future of education might look like. This began with the analysis of texts such as Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which alternatives to the ‘banking system of education’ are proposed. Pedagogy is not only important in its curriculum and content, but in its formats and spaces as well. We have recently been propelled into our most digitized human experience yet. Instead of a dichotomy between classroom and platform, I want to imagine possibilities in which these two are intertwined and interwoven. What would the decentralization of schooling look like, and how would it address the systems it is already a part of and anchored in?

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Thesis Statement Draft 03

Starting off with an interest in pedagogy, my thesis looks to explore alternative learning spaces rooted in today’s digital era and acknowledging the infrastructure of the internet that allows it. Looking at voids and interstices in cities that seem both architectural and urban in their scale, I aim to root the project in the LA River and Beirut River – sites that seem quite identical but simultaneously extremely different. I am interested in the difference in the implementation of infrastructure versus architecture and its program. With the emergence of the internet came cybercafes; what new programs will come to life with the rise of virtual reality?

Final Thesis Statement

What will education look like in the coming decades? I want to explore a new prototype of what university institutions could be -or not be, anchored in urban voids such as the LA River and potentially Beirut River: spaces that are simultaneously architectural and urban in their scale. I chose Sci-Arc as the starting point and site of exploration. Today, pedagogy has evolved beyond the physical containment of a classroom, introducing a highly digital dimension through platforms, and institutions face many challenges to uphold their legitimacy and sometimes relevance. With the emergence of the internet came new programmatic spaces such as Cybercafes. I want to speculate on the new architectural spaces that could emanate from the rise of virtual and augmented reality

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today, by proposing alternative learning spaces and programs placed in city interstices that could challenge the traditional typology of higher education.

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Provocations

Social Equity Workshop with Thabisile Griffin

Your theory/ practice must answer to the

ble? How can something architectural, a

following: Are these private, public, or

building, uplift populations? I have read

[other] spaces? What specifically do they

that it is possible, only when a sense of

include? How is ownership negotiated?

community is created through these struc-

How do beauty and aesthetic fit in? How

tures. Concrete itself cannot be uplifting,

will it be sustained? Which populations will

it is what happens in its enclosure, and

you be providing this practice to? What

the best we can do is create an enclosure

are foreseeable conflicts and how are you

welcoming and nurturing and perhaps

envisioning overcoming them?

challenging enough to perpetuate these new actions and hence create new com-

Its very easy to say something is for People

munities. At the end of the day, it is the

with a big P. But eventually it will always

program itself that matters, a program

be for some people and against others.

that can simply be a little bit bent and

Not directly against, but then not neces-

twisted and molded by spaces, but a pro-

sarily FOR either. Is it for the people when

gram nonetheless. A lot of designers seem

it's not for the elites? When is it accessi-

to believe that their designs can provide

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solutions for problems that are not archi-

chine that could be anywhere? What if its

tectural. There is only so much it can solve.

on a slope, what then? What if its in a very

Undocumented people will still be living in

hot and sunny city, what if it rains all the

paranoia and fear. Neurodivergent people

time, what if.. Is it a metaverse school? No.

will still feel unwelcome in certain areas.

Is it a videogaming school? Okay.. whos it

Unhoused neighbors could perhaps find

for? Whos playing that game? Someone

housing, but the lack of housing is not the

going to school the next day? Whats the

issue, so building more is not a solution.

use? Is it a video, a short film, a feature

Service workers. I am going off-topic. Is

length?

the space that welcomes them all hypo-

Maybe a school can only be relevant

thetical only?

through its implementation.

The project that I am looking to explore

Maybe architecture can only be relevant

in my thesis project is that of education

through its existence in real life.

primarily, with which comes schools as

How much can parallel narratives truly

that educational space. My research has

affect an existing narrative?

been mainly non-architectural thus far. Which populations? All. Where? Anywhere. How? Not even sure, could be hypothetical rather than real. How useful is it to provide a school - without a contextual site. What does that say about the project itself? Is it seeing architecture as an education ma-

02.07 Discussion with Marcelyn Gow Questions raised: What aspects of education would you like to innovate on? What does this digital context of today mean for education? How to make it more flexible? The incorporation of the digital aspect. What could these technologies be? How much of it is a space? How much of it is a platform? How can the curriculum itself and the spaces be intertwined: a specific location for each seminar? What is a site? The site as a cinematic environment, a cinematic context. Storytelling aspect through the people of the community. Student vs. Faculty -> participants How to break down that hierarchy? The in-between spaces. The Undercommons by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten

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01. Words

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Academia Accessibility Agency Campus Deschooling Disruption Elite Equity Exclusion Inclusion Infrastructure Interdisciplinary Narrative Pedagogy Platform Representation Tools Resistance Unschooling World-Building

02. Texts

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Pedagogy of the Oppressed Paulo Freire 1968 This book is considered one of the foundational texts of critical pedagogy. Dedicated to what is called “the oppressed” and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between what he calls ‘the colonizer and the colonized’. In the book Freire refers to traditional pedagogy as ‘the banking model’ because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggybank. However, he argues for pedagogy to treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge. For Freire, education is never a neutral process. It is either designed to facilitate freedom or it is ‘education for domestication’, that is an essentially conservative process designed to facilitate the continuation of the status quo. In the latter process, people are prevented from seeing the world as something which can be changed. Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ aims to develop consciousness and lead to action to create change, through a process of dialogue and reflection. It is a pedagogy which must be forged with, and not for the oppressed. People do not go through the process of developing consciousness (‘conscientization’) by

having things explained to them, but rather by engaging in dialogue about their lives and the lives of others. Learners are not receptacles to be filled, nor is knowledge a gift from those who have ots, to those who have none. Liberatory education consists in acts of cognition, rather than transference of information. In this process, the teacherstudent relationship needs to be reconceptualised.

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Deschooling Society Ivan Illich 1971

"As citizens have new choices, new chances for learning, their willingness to seek leadership should increase. We may expect that they will experience more deeply both their own independence and their need for guidance. As they are liberated from manipulation by others, they should learn to profit from the discipline others have acquired in a lifetime. Deschooling education should increase — rather than stifle — the search for [people] with practical wisdom who would be willing to sustain the newcomer in his educational adventure. As masters of their art abandon the claim to be superior informants or skill models, their claim to superior wisdom will begin to ring true." “Institutions create certainties, and taken seriously, certainties deaden the heart and shackle the imagination”

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Teaching to Transgress bell hooks 1994

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Radical Education Workbook 2012 +their reading list

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The ignorant schoolmaster Jacques Ranciere Ranciere challenging the hierarchical binary between the ignorant mass and the educated elite, and his works basically wanted to move away from that logic.

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Letters: This country is burning, let’s dream about a school of improper education Speaking of school as radical study practices, instead of disciplinary institution/ apparatus I’m now thinking of nyantrik. In popular knowledge now nyantrik considered to be practiced only in pesantren, the Islamic boarding school. Traditionally the santri ngaji and nyantrik under 20 respected Kiai almost throughout the day and they are obliged to perform certain ascetic practices. What’s interesting, in pesantren, it is as if there is no line between life and studying. This history of education is often overlooked (or deemed improper!), as our imagination of schooling has been narrowed down to “modern” colonial education defined by Dutch colonization. Properness. Students wearing clean uniforms. Teachers standing in front of a blackboard and explaining encyclopedias. Punishment for bad behaviour. Notorious exams to pass a grade. A certificate. speaking of colonial education I cannot help but think about its counterpart, the sekolah lia (unlicensed school, literal translation: wild school) that made the colonial government feel so threatened. sekolah liar emerged in the 1920s as a reaction against the discriminative education colonial policy that only allows kids with priyayi (elite Javanese) background to enter the school. one of the pioneers of sekolah liar is taman siswa (literal translation: garden of students), established in 1922 in yogyakarta by the now-celebrated as the ‘indonesian father of education”, ki hadjar dewantara.

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Global Tools 1973-1975 Valerio Borgonuovo, Silvia Franceschini Beatriz Colomina Foreword Global Tools was first and foremost an experiment with alternative education, probably inspired by Ivan Illich’s arguments in Deschooling Society of 1971, a reference for Superstudio and Andrea Branzi. In a remarkable anticipation of the present, Illich had argued for the use of advanced technology to support “learning webs” based on sharing: “educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.”2 Global Tools called for “life as a permanent global education.” Taken together as a living interactive organism, all these experiments constituted an extraor dinary transformation of architectural pedagogy and a massive redefinition of architecture itself. Indeed, these pedagogical experiments can be understood as architectural projects in their own right. This is one of the fundamental paradoxes of “Radical Pedagogy”: the avant-garde assault on institutions invariably produces new institutions, new forms of dogma that have to be undermined by another avantgarde.

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I learned something in school today. I signed up for folk guitar, computer programming, stained glass art, shoemaking and a natural foods workshop. I got Spelling, History, Arithmetic and two study periods. So what did you learn? I learned that what you sign up for and what you get are two different things. Charles Schulz: Peanuts

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This book argues that education is just one possible mode of study among many alternatives. Modes of study are bound up with diferent modes of world-making—ways of making ourselves, politics, economies, communities, cultures, and so forth.5 I argue that the education-based mode of study supplements modes of world-making that are associated with modernist, colonial, capitalist, statist, white-supremacist, heteropatriarchal norms. In the course of political struggles between conflicting modes of world-making, education has been presented as the best and only option for study. Because it is romanticized in this way, the possibilities of alternative modes of study have become almost unthinkable. Against the grain, this book takes aim at the romance of education. I define the education-based mode of study as entailing seven main features that have powerful efects for composing the means and relations of study: a vertical imaginary—students rise up the levels of schooling (e.g., pre-K through twelfth grade through higher education) a romantic narrative—students face obstacles, and overcome them as heroic individuals, along their journey up education’s levels relations of separation between students as producers and the means of studying—the teacher enforces this separation and regulates relations across it techniques of governance—students’ subjectivities are shaped with dispositions of obedience to the teacher’s

authority as an expert a zero-point epistemology—the teacher’s expert knowledge is seen as universally valid, from a position above any particular bodies and places in the world an afective pedagogical economy of credit and debt—students are disciplined to desire honor and avoid shame in the eyes of their teachers and fellow students, often taking the form of grades on exams binary figures of educational value and waste (e.g., the success vs. the failure, the college-bound vs. the remedial, the graduate vs. the dropout) To elaborate on education’s role in the rise of capitalism, chapter 4 describes how education was used in reactions to resistances in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The first part of the chapter focuses on the emergence of the term “education” in 1530s England. People’s rebellions pushed King Henry VIII’s regime into a widespread crisis of legitimacy. The political technology of education served as a narrative solution when coupled with a constellation of binary, individualized figures—for example, “idle” people with “bad education” versus “hardworking” people with “good education.” The rising liberal, colonial, patriarchal, capitalist project was entwined with political theorists’ development of the education-based mode of study. To examine an emblematic example of these theorists, I analyze how John Locke frames the Others of modernity—the poor, women, slaves, and natives—in coconstitutive oppositions with the figure of the self formed through education.

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03. Projects

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PART ONE Weeks 01-04

Spaces

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"why look at precedents so closely, you have been going to school your whole life" It is not a precedent-based thesis, but a thorough understanding of the way architects have been viewing education over the years is necessary in order to understand the ways in which it could still go. Most radical shifts in the perception of educational buildings did not emerge from a need to change the spaces themselves, or from an architecrual standpoint - they had been sociological or environmental, like the rise of tuberculosis or the current covid pandemic, or based on emerging studies in regards to teaching and learning, or through the inclusion of new tools and technologies, and some were a political decision to simply build new schools with new visions. New visions come with a new spaces. So what might the next campuses look like?

The series of schools (from highschool to higher educa shaped by architecture.

1 2

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ation) focuses on the different ways education can be

PRECEDENTS 1

2 3 4 5

Walter Gropius' Village College, Impington, 1936 Behnisch & Partners' Gymnasium, 1969 Classroom plan of village primary school, 1889 Carl Hintrager's Esseg School, 1894 Hans Scharoun's Geschwister-SchollSchool, 1961

Waldschule für kränkliche Kinder Walter Spickendorff 1904, Berlin The very first open-air school worldwide was meant to prevent children from tuberculosis. It was located in the borrough of Westend, in the city of Charlottenburg, near Berlin, Germany, in the outskirts of Grunewald forest. Waldschule für kränkliche Kinder (translated: forest school for sickly children) was built in 1904 by Walter Spickendorff, a city architect. The school was founded by the pediatrist Bernhard Bendix and Berlin's school inspector Hermann Neufert. It led to the beginning of the open air school movement which quickly spread across Europe and North America. Approval for the school was granted by the local authority in June 1904 and it opened on August 1. Spickendorff designed the school to provide the most exposure to the sun. The school took its name from its situation within a pine tree forest, the Grunewald, part of Germany's capital since 1920.

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An open-air class in New York, circa 1911.

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Open-air class in manual training on the boat Southfield at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, which transformed ferry barges into floating wards to battle tuberculosis.

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Open Air School Jan Duiker 1927, Amsterdam Concept The Open Air School on Cliostraat Street is part of a series of schools that were mostly located in the countryside and were intended for sick children, to help them gain strength with the help of the sun and fresh air. Duiker designed the first outdoor school for the healthy child in the inner courtyard of an urban block. To meet the requirements of hygiene and optimal penetration of sunlight and air, the architect minimized construction, a working method that is characteristic of the Dutch Modern Movement, Nieuwe Bouwen. In the Open Air School, the ideals of modern architecture, light, air and space have been reached in an uncertain way. It joins the Zonnestraal factory also of Duiker in Hilversum and the Van Nelle Factory of Van der Vlugt in Rotterdam as one of the masterpieces of this type of architecture in the Netherlands. Raised in the inner courtyard of a perimeter block, it was preceded by five preliminary plans for several locations. Since the beginning of the 20th century open air schools have been built to help physically weak children gain strength aided by sun and fresh air. In 1927 Duiker and Bijvoet were commissioned to design such a school in Amsterdam-South.

Starting from the concept that the physical training of children is as important as the intellectual Jan Duiker organized the classrooms in such a way that they receive abundant natural light and sun. In turn, the terrace shared by the classrooms of the upper floors, which is also used as a classroom, is accessible as many months a year, in good or bad weather, since it is covered and protected from the wind.

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1.2. Exterior Photos of the Open Air School

Open Air School Jan Duiker 1927, Amsterdam Plans

Ground Floor Plan

First Floor Plan

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Type Plan

Open Air School Jan Duiker 1927, Amsterdam The Shool The school consists of a square classroom block in four levels placed diagonally on the site. This basic square is subdivided into four quadrants around a diagonal central staircase. East and west quadrants each contain one classroom per storey and share an open air classroom on the south side. Originally the main building of the school had seven square classrooms, 7.80×7.80m and a height of 3.40m, one on the ground floor and two on each of its three upper floors, with a sunken gymnasium under the classroom of the ground floor to reach the necessary height. Three of the walls of the classrooms are glazed, the fourth that serves as support for the slate and where the entrance door to the classroom is also located is the only one from floor to ceiling masonry. The access windows to the terraces open in all its width. In the small distributor of each floor and in front of the stairs the doors of the toilets are located. The building is crowned by a terrace. Currently, access from Cliostraat Street is flanked by a low and transparent block of houses that allows you to see the school from the street and a baby room built on a bicycle shelter. An entrance pavilion and a “bridge” were built that houses classes

for recreational activities. Once the school building was built, the inner courtyard remained with an asphalted surface of 1,350 m2. The concrete columns are situated not at the corners but in the middle of the quadrants’ sides, producing a favourable distribution of forces in the facade beams, keeping the corners free of columns and strengthening the school’s open, ‘floating’ appearance.

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1.2. Interior Photos of the Open Air School

Corona Avenue Elementary School Richard Neutra 1935, Los Angeles On an evening in March 1933, a devastating offshore earthquake, probably triggered by deep drilling for oil, struck the southern districts of Los Angeles. More than 230 schools, most built in brick and lath, and all thankfully empty at the time, were left either in ruins or in too unsettled a condition to be occupied. Within a month, an urgent programme of earthquake-resistant school building and re-building was commenced. Architects were encouraged to experiment with open plans, lightweight materials, single span construction, and low profiles. Neutra’s additions to the Corona Avenue School, among the first to be completed, took the ‘experimental’ brief much further, envisaging free forms of learning through movement and activity, establishing fluid connections between interior classroom and outdoor court, and employing a repeatable module that could be extended at will. he press called the classrooms “glassand-garden rooms,” as each featured a movable glass wall that slid open onto broad patios and gardens. Students were able to easily push their own lightweight chairs and desks right outside for lessons on the lawn. Ample high windows across from the glass walls doubled access to fresh air and light, and the seven classrooms in the new L-shaped wing

were linked by an innovative flat-roofed outdoor hallway. Local residents said the new building resembled “an airplane hangar” or even “a penthouse on Mars.” Corona Avenue Elementary School was referred to as a “test-tube school” for its experimental nature. They felt it was high time school architecture caught up to the advances of progressive educational theory and child psychology, which promoted education that “revolved around the child,” and encouraged critical thinking instead of rote indoctrination. The school’s principal, Georgina D. Ritchie, said the new classrooms gave students a feeling of freedom in their studies, unlike the restrictions imparted by the four walls of a conventional classroom. She declared the school “a distinct improvement from the standpoint of health, safety, and educational opportunity.” Neutra’s addition to Corona Avenue Elementary School was not strictly conceived as an open-air school, but he shared the common belief that buildings emphasizing access to sun and fresh air made their residents healthier, both physically and mentally.

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2. 1. Neutra drawing of the school 2. Photos and plan

Corona Avenue Elementary School Richard Neutra 1935, Los Angeles In 1953, when architectural photographer Julius Shulman visited the school, he captured the students enjoying their bucolic outdoor classrooms, showing how the flexibility of the design added to the creativity and independence of the students. The girls, wearing bows and dresses, and the boys with buzz cuts and overalls, sit cross-legged on the lawn holding paper on their laps, perhaps awaiting a drawing activity. In Shulman’s color photograph, older students have brought their chairs outside to sit in the sun and watch their teacher explain a lesson from a movable display board. We see the bright green paint on the outside of the sliding glass wall, a cheerful color that complements the verdant shade tree, while children in small groups listen to a lesson or paint alfresco on easels. A ball lies on the grass near glass-and-garden rooms, ready for outside play.

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1.2. Photos of the school

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A Dutch outdoor school in the 1950s

Dessau Bauhaus Walter Gropius 1926. Desseau Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, in 1919, as a new kind of art school based around a holistic approach to the creative disciplines. The objective was to facilitate the creation of a Gesamtkunstwerk – or total work of art – in which buildings and everything in them were designed as a whole entity. The Bauhaus promoted a unified vision for the arts that made no distinction between form and function, and therefore Gropius wanted the school's architecture to reflect these values. An appreciation of the evolving relationship between art and industry was also key to the Bauhaus philosophy, which informed the use of modern materials and industrial processes across its various creative subjects. The campus features an asymmetric pinwheel plan, with dedicated areas for teaching, an auditorium and offices, and housing for students and faculty distributed throughout three wings connected by bridges. The building is comprised of three wings all connected by bridges. The school and workshop spaces are associated through a large two-story bridge, which creates the roof of the administration located on the underside of the bridge.

Among the innovative methods used in its construction were a framework made from reinforced concrete and brick, large expanses of glazing, and flat roofs covered with asphalt tiles that could be walked on. The Bauhaus Dessau's most striking features are its glass curtain walls, which wrap around corners and provide views of the building's interiors, and its supporting structure. The completed building encapsulated the notion of a Gesamtkunstwerk, with interior fittings, furniture and lighting produced in the school's workshop To incorporate the students of the Bauhaus, the interior decoration of the entire building was done by the wall painting workshop, the lighting fixtures by the metal workshop, and the lettering by the print shop. With the Bauhaus building, Gropius thoughtfully laid out his notion of the building as a 'total work' of compositional architecture.

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1. Cae Lique Dolest Abo 2. Lorem Ipsum Dolor — Eicidentist 3. Tesequo Sitioratur Rehent

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Plans

W V 1934. England s Andrew Saint, in his book Towards a Social Architecture: The Role of School Building in Post-War England, wrote: “Henry Morris’s celebrated series of village colleges in Cambridgeshire were the most prophetic expression of what a ‘community school’ might mean … an educational example [and] … an architectural one as well.” Thus the village colleges anticipated the postwar school building boom, and many of the values enshrined within it. Designed by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius with British architect Maxwell Fry in 1939, it is an exemplar of humanist modernism: an essay in genteel grandeur, with barely perceptible curves, local yellow bricks, ribbon windows and a fanshaped hall that influenced London’s Royal Festival Hall. In 1971 it became Grade 1 listed, reflecting the importance of Gropius’s only British project. The remarkable Grade 1 Listed Building of Impington Village College was born from the meeting of two visionary thinkers. Founder of the Bauhaus movement Walter Gropius fled Nazi Germany in 1934, when he came to London to join an architectural partnership with Maxwell Fry. At the same time the innovative educationalist Henry Morris was negotiating investment and land to build three new Village Colleges in Cambridgeshire. Morris believed that the Village College building should act as ‘the silent teacher’,

offering a welcoming and inspiring space for local communities to learn and socialise. When he met Gropius in 1934 there was no doubt in his mind as to who should design the buildings at Impington. Gropius’ radical plan brought new consideration for the social impact of the built environment, and laid out a model for school and community buildings that has since been replicated around the world.

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1. Axonometric drawing 2. Photo an entrance 3. Interior photo

IIT Campus Mies Van Der Rohe 1952-1956 In 1940, Armour Institute and Lewis Institute merged in Chicago to create the Illinois Institute of Technology. Mies' plan for the IIT campus was one of the largest projects he ever conceived and he developed it for twenty years. Today the campus contains 20 of his works. The master plan for the campus was based on a 24' by 24' grid that was the structural module used as a mechanical tool for locating building columns. "Orderliness was the real reason," Mies stated on his use of the grid. The dimension of it was determined by room size, accommodating classrooms, drafting rooms, and laboratory work, which were the three main types of expected activity to occur on the campus. Room sizes were determined from the sizes and arrangements of desks, drafting tables, and lab benches. This in turn began as a reverse planning order and determined the direction of the growth of the campus, where the furniture determined the room size, which then added up to the building size, and together the buildings created the campus. The grid created the space between and within the two to three story buildings and incorporated Mies' concept of "universal space." His ideas included the expression of structure, exterior walls used as skin, and the overlapping placement

of buildings to allow space to flow. The design challenge arose with programs that did not fit within the activities with which he structured the grid around, for example, the auditorium and stairs. He continued reworking the plan so that they became part of the building blocks. In the final rendition he used his concept of universal space to solve the problem. The auditorium became a huge column-free space, allowing these specific programs to take their own forms free from the gridded structure. In this way, building structure was also not compromised by interior functions. The existing street grid was incorporated into the campus area to determine green zones allowing for a relationship with the buildings and nature, resulting in a clear urban solution. Designed in 1956, Crown Hall is a straightforward expression of construction and materiality. The building has an open plan that does not have the disruption of columns, once again creating "universal space." The only partitions in the building are free-standing oak partitions that mark different spaces for different activities. With a ceiling height of 18 feet and a massive floor area of 120' by 220', the architecture school contains perfect studio spaces that allow creative interaction among users.

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1. Plan 2. Photo

Geschwister Scholl girls secondary school Hans Scharoun 1962, Luenen, Westphalia In his second school project, the Geschwister Scholl girls secondary school at Luenen, Westphalia, Scharoun dropped his specialised classrooms in favour of a more flexible classroom unit. He called this a Klassenwohnung or class-dwelling, because he intended each pupil to identify with it as a kind of second home. Each of these consists of a classroom, annexe, entrance lobby and external teaching space. The shape of the classroom and annexe was designed to allow flexibility of seating layout, a consideration that has been found psychologically very important. The lighting, rather than being specifically directional, is obtained from all sides through clerestory windows. The Klassenwohnungen are grouped into school units, though these are much less strongly defined than those in the Darrnstadt project, having no distinct unit spaces and no ‘gatehouse towers’. The ‘open zone’, though, is much more developed, the central part of the main circulation space being opened out into a ‘break’ hall to replace the playground in wet weather. This intermediate space is quite irregular, being formed by the outsides of the other parts, and this expresses very well its transient function.

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1. Geschwister School. 2. Floor Plan. Left: Pictures of the interior spaces.

Marl School Hans Scharoun 1970s Concept This primary school embodies radical yet humane ideas about the potential of architecture to shape social and pedagogical interaction. Scharoun envisaged a school articulated as a series of diverse individually shaped elements strung together like houses in a village and linked by a street-like interior. Not only was this intended to give the rooms separate identities closely related to their functions, but also to develop in the pupils a high degree of territorial identity. There were even theories about why classrooms for differently aged pupils should have different shapes and colours. ‘Since children are so impressionable in their early years, a rich childhood can be the foundation for a whole life. Education is not just the development of intellectual capabilities, not just the achievement of particular knowledge and abilities: it is a process which allows the bringing together and developing of all faculties. Therefore learning must be in harmony with the child’s growth and development, and the school, like the home, must stand as evidence that the earth is a good place to dwell.’

The Marl School was Scharoun’s final chance to put his educational ideas into practice. Marl was a new town founded in the 1920s around a coalmine, and it later provided the workforce for a large chemical works. Klassenwohnung (classroom-flat) as the second home for the child was executed with clerestory-lit main teaching space, annexe, external teaching space and cloakrooms, the Klassenwohnungen strung together along a generous Gruppenraum which could be used for activities shared between them. The classrooms were differentiated in relation to the ages of children between Unterstufe, Mittelstufe and Oberstufe, each given its own group territory, though the eldest had the least identifiable territory, being intended to possess the whole. The classes in their different wings fed into an irregular street-like foyer surrounding the central assembly hall and theatre which gave the school its heart. Here not only assemblies and teaching events were to be held, but also films, plays and concerts, making it a cultural centre for the whole area in the evenings.

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1. Circulation space between entrance and assembly hall 2. Pupils at Marl primary school in the 1970s, when the school was first completed. 3. Classroom fitted out for domestic science.

Marl School Hans Scharoun 1970s The school was orientated, classrooms for the youngest children being set to the south, the entrance and staff-wing to the north, and the gymnasium at the northeast corner with direct entry for use by adults in the evenings. On the west side was a range of purpose-designed rooms for specialist subjects including natural science and domestic science. A northlit workshop with forge and heavy tools was meant to evoke the atmosphere of a factory, both to mimic the conditions of production and to prepare pupils for later life in industry. Current conditions The building was completed more or less as planned, with good materials and finishes, and an impressive atmosphere. Already by the time of a visit in 1972, though, some conditions of the brief had changed and classes were overcrowded, but the atmosphere was good, and much appreciated by staff and students. The school was even considered too beautiful by some staff and therefore extravagant. New uses were invented for parts of it, including a music school and a home for refugees, but partitions had to be added, breaking the fluidity of the internal street. Maintenance was neglected and vandalism began, break-ins counteracted by addition of prison-like bars over

classroom windows. The bitumen felt roofs, the inevitable ’60s solution for lowpitched roofs, began to age and leak. Today, the Scharoun school is at the centre of the regional network of music schools, using its assembly hall (MiniPhilharmonie as the Principal calls it) as their concert hall. Following renovation, classroom wings will also be reused as a local primary school.

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Floor Plan

Marl School Hans Scharoun 1970s Changes in site level were exploited in directional steps offering the kind of spatial punctuation found in all Scharoun’s later work, and guiding the visitor through. Most of the school remained single-storey, daylight being admitted throughout, and also through tiny planted courtyards. Even the auditorium offered daylit conditions with a big window and tubular rooflights closable by rotating shutters like butterfly valves.

Elevation

Sketch Section

Section

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Marl School Hans Scharoun 1970s Fifty years on Scharoun’s design for Marl presents the classic plan for the aggregated school, so that by now accusations of irrationality and ‘zerdenkerism’ seem misguided. His individual elements of building have their own evident logic and discipline, yet are also well interrelated, with every swing of angle or change in level used to advantage, and with an unfolding view and a leading route the constant concern. Many rooms are actually rectangular with straightforward load-bearing construction, yet the system is always local, and the in-between spaces are in contrast irregular, so one recognises them to be of a different kind. As regards the theatre at the heart, an irregular quadrant folds the audience around the action, recalling a semicircular pattern of gathering still seen with public performances in the open air, which extends back to Greek theatre. The polygonal classrooms can be used in centralised or linear mode, and their hexagonal shape allows clerestory lighting from all sides. Those for the younger children are tighter, more enclosing, those for the older children more conducive to the imposition of discipline. Tapered, raked lecture theatres and sawtooth roofed workshops add further recognisable forms, and in a building without chimneys

the brick flue of the workshop forge provides a powerful accent. All helps to differentiate one part from another and establish different territories with clear thresholds and evident changes of scale. Scharoun believed this would help the child understand what it meant to belong to a small group relative to a large one, and to move between the two. The school is a city with separate houses and linking streets, and its dense low-rise form, with constant exposure to the outside world via windows and rooflights of many kinds, means that the natural world is never far away. The junior school is reached by an open roofed link, and the internal street was meant to keep at a buffer temperature, not the usual 23 degrees Celsius. Little courtyards relieve the classrooms, and at two prominent corners they provide light and view to the internal street, one a former biotope as part of natural sciences.

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The Marl School.

A workshop converted into a music practice room. The original spaces were very adaptable to new uses.

The assembly hall.

Lumen Building, Wageningen University Stefan Behnisch 1998, Netherlands The laboratory and administration building, now called Lumen, is located in the north of the university city of Wageningen, close to other existing agricultural institutes. The design brief was for a functional, user-friendly research facility working in harmony with nature; versatile and ecologically sound. The building was designed not to dominate its rural setting, but to embrace the landscape, with all workplaces in direct contact with indoor and outdoor gardens. Two indoor gardens provide the focus for daily activities and function as informal meeting areas. Beyond this, they are an integral component of the building’s energy concept, improving the performance of the external envelope. This EU pilot project for ecological construction incorporates progressive ideas from both the client and user groups, creating a multi-layered framework that is capable of responding to the multitude of demands in such a research establishment. The design’s deliberate aesthetic imperfection is an appeal to an unmediated, primarily sensory experience of architecture. The project was realised within a standard budget demonstrating that durable and sustainable building techniques can be applied without additional costs.

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1-4. Interior images of the Lumen Building

Hellerup School Arkitema 2002, Denmark The Hellerup School is in the suburbs north of Copenhagen, Denmark. Hellerup is an open-plan school. There are no classrooms but rather a series of contiguous, multipurpose spaces arrayed around the central stairs, which themselves double as social meeting areas or lecture seats. Furniture and temporary folding walls form moveable enclaves and nooks. Hellerup is not the first or only open-plan school (a concept that’s existed since the 1960s), but it combined new teaching and architectural ideas. The open design at Hellerup requires cooperation. Without walls, the space creates total transparency: Everyone always knows what colleagues are doing and all must coordinate to share common areas. No one would yell at a student in this environment — and everyone would know if someone broke that rule. The building allows teachers and students to create spaces together, Compared to children at a traditional school, students at Hellerup have a tremendous amount of freedom in how they work. Although their schedule is punctuated by brief periods of teacher-led instruction, much of the children’s day is flexible. Students carry out coursework in the manner and pace that suits them — whether it’s sprawled on a sofa in a quiet corner or within a gaggle of talkative classmates sharing

a common computer. As a 2013 report from the EU Joint Research Center put it, the school emphasizes “learner choice and empowerment in every possible area.” Student and teacher together are jointly responsible for learning. That heightened sense of ownership, which some research suggests could strengthen students’ desire to learn, is one of the many facets of an educational approach called “personalized learning.” Although definitions vary broadly, personalized learning endeavors to design educational experiences that suit an individual student’s abilities and interests. It’s an idea that’s gaining traction as technology offers new tools for both tracking student learning and customizing classwork based on past performance. Hellerup, now in its 16th year of operation, is like a living laboratory for these ideas and one that has inspired other schools to take similar steps. Over time, the community has made adjustments, including increasing its emphasis on social development and collaborative work, in part to address concerns that personalized learning might be solitary learning. As the school continues to find its footing, it can offer lessons for other schools to follow, even if they do so on a smaller scale.

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2. 1. Circulation space between entrance and assembly hall 2. Pupils at Marl primary school in the 1970s, when the school was first completed. 3. Classroom fitted out for domestic science.

Hellerup School Arkitema 2002, Denmark Hellerup’s student body is divvied up into grades; students are assessed based on projects, portfolios, and standardized tests; and teachers follow the national curriculum. The 10 grades are each split into groups with a designated base and teacher. Each morning, students check in with their teacher to discuss their strategies and goals for the day before students disperse to tackle the associated coursework. They agree where and for how long the child’s work will be conducted — and the teacher helps students make decisions (work alone or in a group, for example). The teacher-student dialogue allows each teacher to negotiate with the student Another major component of the school’s curriculum is project-based work. Several times throughout the academic year, other classes are suspended, and students focus exclusively on their crossdisciplinary projects while working on small teams. At the end of week groups present their work to teachers and peers. Students also have to adjust to the school. “I’ve been here since kindergarten and I like it a lot,” explained Anna, an eighthgrader, but her brother did not enjoy the school’s unusual space. He transferred, preferring a traditional classroom with assigned rooms and desks.

“We have moved a little bit away from the very individualized perspective and now we are focusing on building strong learning communities” When the school opened, it focused on the idea that each child has a learning style, identifying each student's learning style. As research challenged the concept teachers guided students in identifying strengths and weaknesses. Today, they spend a significant amount of time encouraging interpersonal and collaborative skills, strengthened through team-based work. Overreliance on technology is a recurring concern about personalized learning. Apps that serve up classwork based on student ability risk putting each child in a separate isolated learning bubble. Teachers prioritize developing nterpersonal and social skills, emphasizing on “21st century skills,” such as creativity, metacognition and tech literacy, that should serve students in this rapidly, changing knowledge-based society. Students spend much of their school day on computers, which they use to conduct research, work on assignments and, occasionally, communicate with each other.

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2. 1. Circulation space between entrance and assembly hall 2. Pupils at Marl primary school in the 1970s, when the school was first completed. 3. Classroom fitted out for domestic science.

IIT McCormick Tribune Campus Center OMA 2003, Chicago The McCormick Tribune Campus Center seeks to reinvigorate the urbanism inherent – but long since neglected – in Mies van der Rohe's 1940 masterplan for the Illinois Institute of Technology. The large single-storey Campus Center provides a focal point for the previously sundered halves of the campus, and features a noise-absorbing steel tube wrapping the Elevated metro that runs directly over the building and, inside, a dense mosaic of programs including a bookstore, food court, café, auditorium, computer centre, and meeting spaces. How to energize a campus that has half the population that animated it in the 1940s but now double its original footprint? To us, the conundrum implied a building that is able to re-urbanize the largest possible area using the least amount of built substance. To create a new point of density for the campus, we located the building at the heart of IIT – a large rectangle between State and Wabash, 32nd and 33rd streets – and directly underneath the "L", the artery that connects the campus to the rest of Chicago. By enclosing the tracks above the Campus Center in a muffling stainless steel cylinder, a formerly deafening no man's land becomes a not only tolerable but a magnetic environment. The encircled track – known among students sponta-

neously as the Tube – becomes a crucial part of the Campus Center's, and IIT's, image. Rather than stacking activities in a multi-storey building, we opted to arrange each programmatic element of the Campus Center in a dense single plane that would foster an urban condition. To achieve this, in 1997 OMA carried out a study to map the “desire lines” of student foot traffic across the campus. These intersecting diagonal paths are maintained inside the Campus Center itself, linking the multiplicity of activities via a network of interior streets, plazas, and urban islands that form neighborhoods: 24-hour, commercial, entertainment, academic, recreation, and other urban elements in microcosm. The unifying element of the Campus Center is the roof: a sloping concrete slab that protects against the noise of the L while encompassing the heterogenous programs below. Where the roof ducks beneath the "L", the underside of the the Tube juts through the concrete as a reminder of what's above. The roof has a long overhang that embraces the adjacent Commons Hall, Mies's original student centre, designed in 1953. The Commons has its original perimeter and interior wooden partitions preserved, and now functions as a food court.

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Sections

Map of student foot traffic on campus - main axes Plan

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Physical model Exploded Axonometry

3. 1. An entrance 2. The flyover tunnel is 161 meters long and clad in stainless steel 3. The glass one story building

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3. 1. Auditorium 2. Student study space 3. Student study space

Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck School Peter Hübner 2004 In Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck, a former industrial suburb which had developed around a coal mine in the Ruhr area, there is a diverse intercultural community. The local protestant church envisaged a school, which would bring together children of many different cultures and at the same time act as a local catalyst for environmental awareness. Together with IBA (International Building Exhibition) Emscher Park, they prepared a brief for the school, launching an invited architectural competition in 1993, which was won by Stuttgart-based architect Peter Hübner. The core of the competition proposal from his studio Büro plus+ was a sketch of the school, accompanied by a narrative from the near future. The story describes the life of a boy, a son of poor Turkish emigrants, who flourishes into a renowned ecologist, receiving a European Environmental Prize in 2023. By describing how his knowledge of the world and ecology developed through being part of the process of helping plan and build the school, Hübner and his team depicted how both the development process and also the future implications of their proposal, would work. There was a strong emphasis on the educational goals of the process. The school was envisaged as a 'house of learning', where environmental education would play a key role. Strong links with the community were proposed, being

physically integrated with a local park and sharing school facilities (the main hall, workshops, refectory and classrooms) with the members of community. The school was intended to support positive role-models and aspirations in a district which has been labelled as 'stigmatised'. By involving students, teachers and parents in the design process, a strong feeling of identification with the school environment was expected to form along the way. Children's involvement The children, their parents and teachers were involved in the process from the design stage, until the very practical work of building parts of the school with their own hands. The ideas of participants were taken as inspiration by Peter Hübner and his team of architects, allowing the project to develop from its own individual circumstances, accepting the ideas of the users. In the words of Peter Blundell Jones: 'rather than god-like creator, the architect becomes a kind of midwife at the building's birth, guiding the forces that demand its existence and giving them physical shape. It is almost as though the building is already implied by the place and people, and the architect must simply

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find it' (Blundell Jones 2007: p. 99). Children were involved in planning, modelling and construction of the school, in a process which was carried out during two days. Hübner 's architectural studio staff came to work with the pupils and teachers, involving them in various participative activities. The first thing the pupils were asked to do, was to make clay figures of themselves, at the scale of 1:10. They used these as a starting point to discuss what types of furniture they needed, arranging actual chairs and tables in the playground to get a feel for space and scale. Children were invited to think about their houses and what kind of rooms and spaces they offered, and how that related to what classrooms are used for. They brainstormed ideas about the 'classroomhouses' they were designing, and played around with different issues related to building a brand new house – including what materials to use, what types of roofs there are, what kind of windows to use, the orientation and lighting, and many more. They built softwood frame models to explore structural principles and how they fit together. The architects then incorporated children's ideas into the final design,

collaborating with a structural engineer and coordinating proposals with the other architects who were working with different groups of children. Returning to the school, the pupils were shown a 1:10 three-dimensional computer model, and were asked to make models, showing proposed changes and adjustments. These were discussed together with the architects, teachers and parents, and once again included in the final design proposal. After the contractors had set up the basic structures, the teachers, pupils and parents continued to work on finishing and fitting-out, following the learning-bydoing principle. Children also worked with a landscape architect Cristoph Harms to design the school garden, and they continued to work on the garden as part of their education about growing food, rainwater catchment and learning how to make habitats for insects and small animals. The design was intended to be flexible, dynamic and interactive, so the children could keep shaping their own garden as a powerful tool to influence the environment

Moers School Peter Hübner 2005 Participatory design lies at the heart of Peter Hübner’s practice, and in this new school in Germany it comes into its own as students and teachers collaborated with the architects to create a space of their own. The Moers school had been established in the 1950s, but by the turn of the century its buildings needed major refurbishment, and in 2005 there was a national decision to create ‘all-day’ schools. This means not only staying for lunch, but a seven-hour day with a looser, less academic afternoon curriculum including arts and sport. German educationalists believe that quite apart from allowing both parents to work, such schools promote confidence and socialisation, especially in children from poor, troubled or disavantaged homes. The longer day required extra space and facilities, but calculations on the former Moers school revealed that refurbishment and extensions would exceed the price of a new building, so it was better to start afresh on a new site. Peter Hübner’s prizewinning school at Gelsenkirchen evoked the greatest enthusiasm and promise as a model,1 and two of its essential qualities were adopted: that it would take an aggregative form like a small city, and that the classrooms would be participatively designed as the child’s second home.

Architects from Hübner’s office visited Moers for a workshop and the school community was divided into four groups, each under the charge of one architect. They were given the task of setting out the parts as clay blocks on the triangular site. Versions were compared, and the architects then returned to their office to work up an optimal version which was presented to the school four weeks later for further comment. In parallel, full-day sessions were held with single classes and their teachers, allotted one architect each. Each class had its own entrance area and lavatory facilities like a small flat, and also some kind of gallery and external garden. It is accepted policy that children belong to a particular classroom and teacher during their whole time at the school, even though many subjects are taught in more specialised rooms, so the class becomes the child’s second home and the teacher his or her long-term mentor. First, pupils draw themselves to scale, then they make clay models of their bodies. These are placed to inhabit a wooden framework assembled with the help of the architect, all to scale, so they can see how the spaces work. An important design limit was a standard class width of 9 metres wall to wall, but allowing variations in front, back and roof. Again

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Again the architects returned to their office to work up detailed classroom versions with help from engineers and other specialists, before returning to build large-scale models with the pupils. As the new school was also to include a youth club, a further participative group involved youth-club members and social workers, run in a similar way. The largescale models were finally assembled so everyone could see the school as a whole, in a party atmosphere.

Moers School Peter Hübner 2005 Site and building Lying between some slab blocks of Modernist housing and a drainage brook, the site began as an empty triangular plot in a green suburb. Since the primary street frontage to the east was largely occupied by a handicapped hostel, only a narrow driveway connection could be made, leaving the school in a secluded backland world whose architectural elevations enjoy a purely local impact. This suits well the design concept of working from the inside out with concentration on the enclosed space, which is at once village square and focal point. Most classrooms are entered directly from this outdoor room, assuring that it is always animated and avoiding the tricky problem of corridors. A concrete tribune on its north side is a reminder of occasional theatrical events, besides providing seating for outdoor teaching or just for casual sitting about during breaks, valued by pupils for the advantageous view. The whole space is gated at both ends to define the school’s territory and control ingress. The cafeteria looks into the central space from the wide end, but also looks the other way to the hall, so becoming a place of transparency, central in feel. The main hall is used for assemblies but also for theatre or concerts for the whole local community, as with Scharoun’s schools and Henry Morris’s

Cambridgeshire Village Colleges.2 It logically occupies the south-east corner, surrounded by two levels of specialised classrooms and staff rooms. Response of teaching staff Head teacher Claudia Corell is a believer in the idea that the school building is ‘the third teacher’ after pupils and staff, remarks that numerous visitors were surprised to discover, ‘the atmosphere of a holiday place rather than an institution’. ‘Current scientific research shows that a school building as “the third teacher” leads to definite behavioural patterns and can influence the development of pupils in a positive or a negative way’, says Corell. ‘This was obvious from the moment we moved in, for example the open routes and lack of right-angled corners has from day one led to an easing of movement in the school. Also our ideas about the uses of rooms and our daily life in our school-village with its new media and bright colours were seriously appreciated only after moving in. We had to find new relationships and possibilities in the new spaces, to modify or revise our rules, even to discard them

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section AA 0 youth club multi puprpose classroom bycicle parking classroom classroom garden student kitchen housework classroom art workshop central hall dining room kitchen courtyard main entrance classroom gallery computer room room of silence music room science laboratories library

15m

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first floor plan

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Moers School Peter Hübner 2005 ‘The special architecture of our school complex allows our pedagogical concept to be optimally developed. It promotes the daily personal responsibility of our pupils as well as their critical awareness in curriculum work, and this continues across breaks and beyond the school day. The focus on personal responsibility, initiated by participation in the school’s design and development, runs like a red thread through all our work. The participative creation of the building form produced a high degree of identification, and after a year of use we experienced another development: that the red thread of personal responsibility and participation has developed into a dynamic process, opening up new directions in pedagogy.’ Many sites lay in the in-between spaces where pupils could meet friends or observe from the edge what was going on. With schools like those at Gelsenkirchen and Moers, full budgets and normal building processes had to be accepted as a matter of course along with a normal contractual responsibility on the part of the architects: everything drawn in advance, all predetermined to the regulations and little site improvisation. Therefore it was essential, whatever ideas emerged from the school body, that they were translated into buildable form, and cynics will doubtless claim that there is

a Hübner style, that it is the architects who are in control, and real participation is somewhat limited. he commitment by the users to their building, once gained, has remained and been passed on. In the case of the Stuttgart Bauhäusle it has continued through about 10 student generations.4 It has led to the buildings being cared for and looked after, but also further developed. Even if the participation was more illusion than reality, the placebo effect and the sense of possession would still be worth having. But there is also an educational effect: all those children modelling themselves, putting their maquettes in a model classroom, learning about scale, space and materials, will that not encourage an improved relation between buildings and society?

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1. Aerial view 2. Photo of interior space

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Hazelwood School Alan Dunlop Architect Limited 2007, Glasgow, UK Description of the architect: "Hazelwood is a school for children and young people, aged 2 to 18, who are blind and deaf – “dual sensory impaired”. Architecturally, it is a new type of project. Many of the school’s children are physically handicapped and all have a degree of cognitive impairment. Together they represent the most acutely disabled children on the City of Glasgow’s education role. They will need lifetime support. I was determined to create a school which would support the needs of the children and the aspirations of their parents, a place of safety and ambition that would free the teacher and inspire the child.Hazelwood School has been a real success. The children and young people respond well to their new environment and appear to be thriving. They are supported by committed teachers in a bespoke school that their parents love and take ownership for. The building has received multiple national and international awards"

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2. 1. Aerial view 2. Photo of the school 3. Interior corridor

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Ørestad College 3XN architects 2007, Copenhagen Ørestad College is the first school in Denmark based on the new visions of content, subject matter, organization and learning systems that came about as a result of ‘reforms’ to the education system in 2004. The three key elements of the changes were the encouragement of interdisciplinary learning; elimination of the traditional division between science and the humanities; and variety in studying and working methods. Communication and interaction resulting in a synergy between students and teachers has been a hallmark of the highly successful school. Communication, interaction and synergy has been key issues. The project displays a visionary interpretation of openness and flexibility regarding team sizes, varying from the individual over groups to classes and assemblies, and reflects international tendencies aiming at achieving a more dynamic and life-like studying environment and introducing IT as a main tool. The intention is also to enforce the students’ abilities gradually to take responsibility for own learning, being able to work in teams as well as working individually. Its vast open space with multiple overlapping layers creates a variety of nooks and crannies, making it easier for pupils to find their own way of working and to collaborate with peers. “They can be inspired by each other as well as by

the teachers,” says Kim Herforth Nielsen, founding partner of 3xn, the architecture firm that designed the school. The spiral staircase is planned as the central meeting place. It is designed to be much wider than mere transportation needs request; it becomes a space in itself.

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2. 1.2. Photos of the common and circulation spaces

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Ørestad College 3XN architects 2007, Copenhagen The college is interconnected vertically and horizontally. Four boomerang shaped floor plans are rotated to create the powerful super structure which forms the overall frame of the building – simple and highly flexible. Four study zones occupy one floor plan each. Avoiding level changes makes the organisational flexibility as high as possible, and enables the different teaching and learning spaces tooverlap and interact with no distinct borders.

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Leutschenbach School Christian Kerez 2009. Zurich In order to preserve the spaciousness of the site, all the rooms inside the building were reduced to the lowest common denominator and stacked atop one another, with public functions accommodated in mezzanines. The classrooms are housed in a threestory steel-framed structure; the gymnasium, of approximately the same height, is surrounded by a continuous frame structure resembling that of the classroom block. The result is not merely a gymnasium on top of a school building, but a structure that consists of repeating references on multiple levels. On the ground floor, the building is contracted into a minimal core area. The entire façade area of the classroom block hangs from the projecting frame structure of the floor, and forms a roof extending more than ten meters out over the playground. The school building has no hallways: all the classrooms open on to large recreational areas that can also be used for teaching activities. The large double stairway divides the primary school from the secondary school and is likewise incorporated into this recreational-and-classroom area. The rooms, stacked above one another, vary in size and height. They constitute variations on the same overall spatial and architectural concept.

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1.2. Photos of the building 3-6. Photos of interior spaces

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School of Architecture Lacaton et Vassal 2009. Nantes In building a structure of great capacity, the project design comes up with a scheme capable of creating a set of rich and diverse situations of interest to the School of architecture, the city and the landscape. Three decks at nine, sixteen and twentytwo meters above the natural ground level, served by a gentle sloping external ramp, progressively put the ground surface of the city in touch with the sky overhead. A lightweight steel structure redivides the height of these main levels. It enables the spaces devoted to the program to be generously installed and creates a system adapted to their extension and their future evolution. Linked to the spaces of the program are ample, double-height volumes with nonattributed functions, the transparent facades of which harness the sun's rays and vouchsafe the indoor climate. On the initiative of the students, teachers or visitors, these spaces become the locus of possible appropriations, events and programming. At any one moment the adaptation of the school to new interventions and its reconversion are possible. Like a pedagogical tool, the project questions the program and the pratices of the school as much as the norms, technologies and its own process of elaboration.

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1-6.. Photos of the school

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41 Cooper Square Morphosis 2009, NYC Internally, the building is conceived as a vehicle to foster collaboration and cross-disciplinary dialogue among the college’s three schools, previously housed in separate buildings. A vertical piazza— the central space for informal social, intellectual and creative exchange—forms the heart of the new academic building. An undulating lattice envelopes a 20-foot wide grand stair which ascends four stories from the ground level through the sky-lit central atrium, which itself reaches to the full height of the building. This vertical piazza is the social heart of the building, providing a place for impromptu and planned meetings, student gatherings, lectures, and for the intellectual debate that defines the academic environment. From the double-high entry lobby, the grand stair ascends four stories to terminate in a glazed double-high student lounge overlooking the city. On the fifth through ninth floors, sky lobbies and meeting places—including a student lounge, seminar rooms, lockers, and seating areas overlooking the cityscape— are organized around the central atrium. Sky bridges span the atrium to create connections between these informal spaces. Further reinforcement of the strategy to create a vibrant intellectual space is provided by the “skip-stop” circulation strategy which allows for both increased physical activity and for more

impromptu meeting opportunities. In the spirit of the institution’s dedication to free, open and accessible education, the building itself is symbolically open to the city. Visual transparencies and accessible public spaces connect the institution to the physical, social and cultural fabric of its urban context. At street level, the transparent facade invites the neighborhood to observe and to take part in the intensity of activity contained within. Many of the public functions an exhibition gallery, board room and a two-hundred-seat auditorium - are easily accessible one level below grade.

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2. 1. Physical model 2. Aerial photo

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University of Iowa Visual Arts Building Steven Holl 2016. Iowa Steven Holl: The new Visual Arts facility for the University of Iowa’s School of Art and Art History provides 126,000 sf of loft-like space for the departments of ceramics, sculpture, metals, photography, print making and 3D multimedia. It also includes graduate student studios, faculty and staff studios and offices, and gallery space. In a school of the arts today, interconnection and crossover are of fundamental importance. Today digital techniques open up increased interconnection between all the arts. Interconnection between all of the departments is facilitated in the vertical carving out of large open floor plates. Students can see activities ongoing across these openings and be encourages to interact and meet. Further interconnection is facilitated by glass partitions along the studio walls adjacent to internal circulation. Natural light and natural ventilation are inserted into the deep floor plates via the “multiple centers of light.” Seven vertical cutouts encourage interaction between all four levels. These spaces of glass are characterized by a language of shifted layers where one floor plate slides past another. This geometry created multiple balconies, providing outdoor meeting spaces and informal exterior working space.

Stairs are shaped to encourage meeting, interaction and discussion. Some stairs stop at generous landings with tables and chairs, others open onto lounge spaces with sofas.

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2. 1. Photo of exterior 2. Photo of interior, atrium space

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University of Iowa Visual Arts Building Steven Holl 2016. Iowa

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emLyon Business School Snohetta 2018 - unbuilt Emlyon is a business school for so called “Early makers”. According to the school, this means “[p]eople who can take their destiny into their own hands, who shape and mold their existence as part of a collaborative process, moving from “Do It Yourself” to “Do It Together”. They are innovators who can bring their projects to fruition, who move from concept to prototype, who try, experiment, make mistakes, start again, and learn as they go.” The design proposal is built around the idea of tension. Half-sunken into its urban context, the building seems to physically shatter the ground as if large tectonic plates were pushed up to create the protective roof of the school. The building further connects to adjacent park areas, tying them together through a street that leads to a publicly accessible roof. The dynamic public space invites the public to interact with the building and theearning environment of the school. The school is accessed through a tilted plaza leading students, staff and visitors into a super-flexible ground floor that reveals the campus’ sprawling student life. The main focus of the project was to create a flexible and generous open space that would ensure that the building can become a place where the early makers of the future can meet their full potential though collaboration, experimentation and innovation.

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3. 1. Auditorium 2. Student study space 3. Student study space

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My past explorations

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2GAX - school

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2GBX - music school

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PART TWO weeks 05-08

Platforms

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what are the implications of the digital?

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Pedagogy doesn't occur in a vacuum. It has an institutional history; pedagogies have politics. Tools have politics. They have histories. They're developed and funded and adopted and rejected for a variety of reasons other than "what works." Even the notion of "what works" should prompt us to ask all sorts of questions about "for whom," "in what way," and "why."

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Next State Dark Matter Labs 2017 Next State was a research and speculative design project to outline the strategic case for economic free zones in the context of a fourth industrial revolution and climate breakdown. Taking the three areas of digital sovereignty, networked supply chains and collaborative working practices. Whereas in the past, free zones have been focused on regulatory exemption and reduced tariffs, we flipped this model, we explored the future technology stack that companies and governments might need to develop high value, humane economies. An innovation testbed for digital regulation, programmable enterprises and open digital infrastructure.

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CyberCafes 1. internet access: started with rise of internet people wna connect (SF Net online forum then all over UK) 2. Piracy in 2000s - hard to track (Mexico, Australia, all over) 3. Gamers - need for better PCs + multiplayer games 2010s - internet cafe just for gaming 4. Japan: private cubicles - can stay overnight 5. rise of internet on mobile phone = decline internet cafe 6. Skirt local gambling law (Colorado)

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Internet Cafe Security Tips Computers at internet cafes are public systems, so they're less secure than those you use at your home or office. Take extra precautions when using them, especially if sensitive information is involved. Bring a USB Flash Drive Bring along a USB flash drive with your portable programs, settings, and documents on it. You'll have all your data with you, but none of your information remains on the cybercafe computer when you unplug the flash drive. Make sure the USB flash drive has antispyware and antivirus programs installed on it. Don't Slack on Common-Sense Security Procedures Your computer screen may be visible to others passing by or sitting behind you. When you finish with a logged-in session, such as email, log out so that the next user doesn't accidentally gain access to your account. Clear the web browser history, temporary files, and cookies when you are finished. It's best to avoid logging on to websites where you have sensitive data, such as your bank account, if possible

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VR Cafes ? in VR cafes, its mostly seen as games, as an 'experience' like going to the arcades, it looks like a gym

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PART THREE Weeks 09-12

Project Proposal

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My thesis project will not pretend to find an 'answer' to the question 'what is the future of education?' because there is no one right answer to this broad inquiry. It is instead the starting point of a process.

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WEEKS 09-10 Potential programs Replace "school/university/campus" by "learning spaces" . VR rooms - exploring the surrounding, tactility, all the senses . internet rooms - like labs/cybercafes, but with a more interactive interface . conference rooms and auditoriums - for screenings/workshops/classes/talks . restaurants and common spaces chilling zones, meeting areas . gallery spaces: real + digital? projections? future of museum? . private working areas

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WEEKS 09-10 Who is it for? its a public system in the city. BUT ideas of surveillance/monitoring hacking/viruses data theft what kind of zone would it be? unmonitored? distribution of power

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DIASPORA

DEFINITION: A diaspora is a scattered population whose origin lies in a separate geographic locale. The dispersion of any people from their original homeland.

Diaspora is the passage from unity to multiplicity,exploring these departure[s] within aselfdom as being plausible only when one consents not to be a single being and attempts to be many beings at the same time. Edouard Glissant

“Every diaspora is the passage from unity to multiplicity.” Glissant believes that, “[people are] in a stage of perpetual change... You can change, you can be without the Other, you can exchange with the Other while being yourself...” That is, for him, understanding and tracing genealogical roots as far back as one can is of less importance than understanding and discovering the bonds that unite all of humankind as one.

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WEEKS 09-10 Potential sites

LOS ANGELES RIVER

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BEIRUT RIVER

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Potential site SCI-ARC why should an institution be so anchored in its space? what if sciarc was mobile? or could expand?

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Potential site SCI-ARC

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WEEK 11 Fiction or reality? The project could be anchored in reality in a way that responds to current environmental and social surroundings in Sci-Arc and Los Angeles, or it could be a fiction that could somehow include the Beirut River and an imaginary expansion of the school through the LA River to the Beirut one.

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Student: Agustina Alaines, LA River plan rendering, 2016

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Student: Pinar Seven, LA River plan rendering, 2016

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01. Crypto-Architecture project by Daniel Horowitz and Jose Mejias 02. Moheb Hezkial and Shabnam Moravveji

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