SPACE AND LEARNING ; | have been involved in building schools for fifty years, during which time many ideas about education have changed, as have the criteria that are applied to building and architecture. But in spite of these developments in time, the spatial themes that are central to my designs have remained constant. What has changed is the allocation of spatial resources — which inevitably imposes certain constraints — but not how children learn and how you can make space for them to do so. ‘Again and again one finds oneself addressing paradoxes that can be resolved primarily (or pethaps exclusively) through spatial means, such as how to enable young people to focus cn just cone thing, while at the same stimulating their curiosity by drawing attention to the richness of their surroundings. Another one: how to make the school into a safe, dependable environment while at the same time opening it up to the world with all the adventures and dangers that children wil need to confront at some stage and with which they will need to familiarise themselves. For me, this makes building schools a fascinating quest for spatial resources that can improve the climate for both learning and living within the dialectics of certainty and relativity, seclusion and openness; the reconciliation of a house with the world. Basically, there are @ handful of themes that always recur in some form or other in all my architectural designs.”” AAs an architect, itis imperative to resist being swept up by any specific view of education and to use it as a point of departure for your design. Architects should not get invoived in debates about education; instead, they should create spatial conditions that will benefit learning in a generat sense. The building should provide @ general framework for education and learning, while being flexible enough to respond to changing demands and even (in a spatial sense) hold out a suggestion of pursuing avenues other than those laid down in the brief. Precisely because almost nothing is clear in the clients’ minds, a building must be durable, in the sense that it must remain usable and capable of responding to new views about education without needing to undergo any fundamental change. In addition, expansion is unaveidable (of our ten schools completed before 2000, seven have acquired or planned new extensions of varying sizes since they were first uit) if the idea of designing buildings as completed compositions, like sculptures, has long ceased to be relevant, this applies pre-eminentiy to schools, which are more susceptible to the restlessness of our demanding society than any other buildings. Scope for Learning in our designs, we were constantly searching for themes that would expand the scope for education and learning situations. Again and again, this meant exploring forms thet sidestepped the ‘archetype’ of a school building, with its rows of classrooms and corridors running along besides them, by designing classrooms less as enclosed units and the corridors more as learning spaces, thus expanding the opportunities for learning situations. Corridors do not belong in schools. Those corridors that are dominated everywhere and always by rucksacks and odd bits of clothing, and by the endless pulling and shoving, badgering and carping that means they have to be made extra wide, using up a large proportion of what might otherwise be inspirational space, while they could instead be ideal places for meeting others, as well as helping to solve the everlasting problem of cramped classrooms. Completely eliminating corridors and adding corner areas, making the space suitable for communal use by diverse groups of pupils, created greater social cohesion and more places for smaller groups, while whole-class instruction could continue to take place in classrooms. In these situations, the introduction of glass concertina partitions that can be altered to produce closed or open spaces truiy revolutionised the scope for flexible change, The Articulation of Space: Spatial Units What matters first and foremost is to articulate the space so as to create as many places as possible where people can work individually or in groups, by fulfilling the necessary spatial conditions. This means using all kinds of architectural resources, from full-height or half-height 1) These themes are elaborated at greater length in my book Space and Learning: Lessons in Architecture 3, Rotterdam: 010 publishers 2008, page 1 of 4walls to steps, storeys or elevated areas, a crucial factor being the size of these elements, which need to create @ sense of boundaries, protection, and separation from others, such as may be brovided by bay windows or recesses, while retaining the overall feeling of unity and community. AA spatial unit could be described as a space that achieves a certain equilibrium between a sense Of seclusion and a sense of community. Where a learning situation is concemed, this means fulfling the conditions that enable you to concentrate on your work while at the same time being aware of others and what they are doing, The crucial factor is always the relative dimensions of the elements, at least suggest the use or the size of the group of users, if not actually determining them, Above all, spatial units must be made to appear inviting, for a small or large group, depending on the design. If @ spatial unit is conceived as a centre of attention, articulating the space will increase the sschoo!’s capacity for centres of attention; following on from this, we see a school building as a conglomerate of as many centres of attention as possible, which can accommodate an equal number of learning situations. The trend towards more and smaller groups, and towards more individual work, calls for the space to be articulated, but not fragmented. Spatial echesion must always be preserved. Not only must the space continue to allow for large groups (like old-style classes) to congregate, but the building must remain 2 unified spatial entity, as 2 place where people are aware of each others’ activities and feel invited to take part in open exchanges with them, Spatial Cohesion In the case of more complex buildings such as an extended or community school (‘Brede Schoo!’), a socio-cultural complex in which each of the participating entities seeks to express its own identity, there is a danger of fragmentation, which would frustrate the initial hope of Cooperation, of working with shared facilities. Only a spatial theme can serve as a binding force, and moreover provide an opportunity to engage in real joint ventures and to undertake activities that none of the constituent institutions could have managed on its own. But even when an architect appears, from the outside, to have succeeded in creating a cohesive Space, the space will not necessarily function as such. The more complex a building becomes, ‘the more it tends to split (in organisational terms) into separate parts, for all the initial expectations of unity. For instance, if different sections are given separate entrances, they will inevitably drift apart, and the communal features will scarcely go beyond a shared central heating boller - in other words, they will be confined to shared running costs. Only with a communal entrance and an interior square or street from which people have access to the different units, each of which can be closed off, can a collective space be created that in principle belongs to all the building’s users, and in which this sense of community can be expressed, In most cases it is not easy, given the implacability of financial restrictions, to free up areas for communal purposes that must be ‘appropriated’ from the surface area of each of the Participating institutions. The specifications are almost always drawn up as an aggregate of each teacher's stated needs for his or her task within the school, to which the manager who has compiled the specifications has added a certain percentage for movement around the building Planned in this way, schools are in danger of becoming mere collections of more or less autonomous elements, each of which may function well on its own, but not as a whole. We do Not have any tradition of 2 communal area that is shared and whose importance is recognised by all, $0 that everyone is willing to make certain concessions in relation to their own territorial claims. The spatial theme, encompassing the building as a whole, does not just encapsulate the sense of community, it also expresses and emphasises it. Theoretically speaking, it could actualy promote the process whereby each of the separate elements acquires its own clear identity. Not only the person responsible for defining the specifications but the designer too will often fall into the trap of worrying mainly about small parts of the whole. if this happens, the design may easily end up being a collection of large and small solutions instead of subordinating all these large and small solutions to a more structural principle that can accommodate all the diverse interests. We are therefore interested in devising a style of architecture as a kind of genetic system that generates ‘kindred’ solutions to the various problems, thus leading to a relationship between all the separate elements that actually gives them the opportunity to emphasise their distinctness. page 2 of 4™~ The School as a City A spatial, comprehensive theme will naturally arouse associations with a system of streets and/or squares. The distinction between open, shared spaces and closed-off, exclusive ones inevitably recalls the public/private divide, which within the urban context serves to define responsibilities. Within a building, this principle can in itself easily be interpreted by the use of soaring heights and daylight from above, these being primary means of reinforcing the association with the city. The higher a space, the more it evokes a sense of community and public access. Of at least equal importance in this context is the difference in use, which in the ‘public zone’ relates to general concerns, whereas within areas designated specifically for teaching purposes - much as in buildings with specific designations in the city - it relates primarily to matters atising within the group. It is especially in ‘public’ areas that you come into contact with others, who are doing different things, and it is there that you are confronted with a larger world than that of your classroom or school, or your particular section of a school. ‘This means that everyone can have 2 patticular domain in which he belongs, besides the communal space that provides scone for exchanges between different domains. Domains do not have to be strongholds. Where the boundaries between private and communal space are permeable and transparent, these will be pre-eminently zones in which the different sections express their identity. It is only a small step to thinking in terms of a kind of shopping street or learning street’ in which the diverse domains, such as classrooms, can manifest themselves, each with its own distinctive character. With the current loss of faith in classrooms as the sole appropriate space for providing education, some have tended to go to the other extreme. They keep everything open, so that all boundaries become blurred, creating as it were @ fluid world with ostensibly ideal opportunities for exchanges. This fails to take account of the fact that such a blurring of identities means there is nothing left to exchange, since everything flows into everything else and nothing has its ‘own place any more. In this situation, people too will be left without a place they can call their ‘own, and will have to navigate a confusing world in the manner of nomads. It is not just buildings that need structure; people too need a structured environment, in which ‘each person can feel at home. You need 2 home base to which you can always retum, and from which you can venture out to explore the world. School as Home ‘The larger a schoo! building becomes, the greater the danger of children feeling lost. While you want to provide the maximum in terms of rich and varied experience, it is at the same time essential to guard against alienation, to ensure that children fee! at home and have the sense of security that comes from sufficient clarity as to where they belong. Numerous studies have shown that children need home-like surroundings that provide a kind of retreat, with space for, personal attributes and accessories, in the manner to which they are accustomed at home — or in, some cases, in a manner that may be quite lacking at home. Many architects (and educationalists too) hold fast to the ingrained illusion of a neat and tidy world, radiating a sense of order, in which the beautifully conceived forms, materials and colours are expressed as clearly as possible. The everyday reality of a school presents a picture that may seem - to the eye untrained in this field - both chaotic and banal, beneath which the architect's ‘original aesthetic intentions can easily be submerged. Just as one cannot exercise any control ‘over the interior of a dwelling (aside from the occasional owner with an unusually well-developed respect for architecture), in a school too, the organisation of the building's interior is designed to give its users a sense of being in familiar surroundings, so that they feel at home there, as much as possible. The ‘persona appropriation of the building by its ‘residents’ goes beyond isolated items of furniture and accessories; it also requires a certain encouragement in elements that are fixed, in which we constantly try to include inviting elements or ‘incitements', and not infrequently challenge the building's users to do something with them. ‘Town Square’ The wider the range of facilities provided by a school ~ including after-school activities, for instance ~ and the more these additional facilities are embedded in the local neighbourhood, the page 3 of 4