Category: Architecture, Design, Planning

"A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction," Christopher Alexander, DS Editor's rating: *****  reviews, pricing or purchase
    "People need green open places to go to; when they are close they use them.  But if the greens are more than three minutes away, the distance overwhelms the need."
     "The roof plays a primal role in our lives. The most primitive buildings are nothing but a roof.  If the roof is hidden, or cannot be used, then people will lack a fundamental sense of shelter."
    "The larger meetings are, the less people get out of them.   But institutions often put their money and attention into large meeting rooms and lecture halls."
    "The area immediately outside the building, to the south - that angle between its walls and the earth where the sun falls - must be developed and made into a place which lets people bask in it."

"Planning and Designing Schools," by C. William Brubaker, 1998, Excerpts below: reviews, pricing or purchase
     "To ask the question "What will the school of tomorrow be? is to begin with the false and misleading assumption that our efforts should be and can be directed toward developing a single solution ...every school is unique. ... the people and neighborhoods they serve are distinctive ..."
     "The secret to "reusing" plans is easy to describe: School designs can be reused if the program, floor plans, sizes, sites, grounds design, access, and plans and specifications are reused without making substantial changes. ...but experience reminds us that educational programs usually need special and creative attention and that sites vary in regard to size, slope, and relationship to their neighbors.  Sometimes, however, the sites are similar, and so the archetype idea may make sense."
     "Speaking about a prototype school design program in New York: "The teaching cluster is the pivotal piece of the prototype concept.  So that children don't get lost in a crowd, the block is designed for 300 students and is envisioned as a microcosm of the entire school.... With this kit of parts, rather than a single building design, many building configurations can be achieved. The alphabet soup of possible building plans (L-shaped, U-shaped, H-shaped, etc.) contains many options."

"Suburban Nation,” The rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream," Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
       The much talked about principle of “schools as centers of community” only makes sense when we look at the planning of the whole community. Reading “Suburban Nation,” is an “AHA” experience; not since Christopher Alexander’s 1967 “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction,” have I nodded so often. Excerpts:
       “A comparison between the size of the parking lot and the size of the building is revealing: this is a school to which no child will ever walk.”
       ”…planners have repeatedly attempted to relive that moment of glory by separating everything form everything else.”
       ”Six fundamental rules that distinguish a neighborhood from sprawl [speaking of Alexandria, Virginia]: 1) The center. Each neighborhood has a clear center, focused on the common activities of commerce, culture and governance. 2) The five-minute walk. A local resident is rarely more than a five-minute walk form the ordinary needs of daily life: living, working and shopping. 3) The street network. Because the street pattern takes the form of a continuous web – in this case, a grid – numerous paths connect one location to another.4) Narrow, versatile streets. Because there are so many streets to accommodate traffic, each street can be small. 5) Mixed Use. 6) Special sites for special buildings.
       “ … the problem with the current development codes is not just their size [lengthy and burdensome to the point of farce]; they also seem to have a negative effect on the quality of the built environment. Their size and result are symptoms of the same problem: they are hollow at their core. They do not emanate from any physical vision. They have no images, no diagrams, no recommended models, only numbers and words. Their authors, it seems, have no clear picture of what they want their communities to be.”  Book Link         

"Medieval Architecture, Medieval Learning : Builders and Masters in the Age of Romanesque and Gothic," by Charles M. Radding, William W. Clark
reviews, pricing or purchase

"Community Participation Methods in Design and Planning,"
by Henry Sanoff  reviews, pricing or purchase 
       An excellent sourcebook for educational planners. Sanoff describes the Visioning Process, Awareness Walks, Action Planning, Participatory Games, Post Occupancy Evaluations and more, with detailed references, charts and illustrations. While incorporating materials from his 1994 book “School Design,” new case studies command our attention. The planning of Centennial Campus Middle School, a partnership between Wake County and North Carolina State University, designed by Boney Architects, is a good example. Sanoff shows us how the planning principles were arrived at, with a clear progression to diagrams and architectural floor plans.
       In an interview with Design Share last year, Sanoff spoke about the importance of post occupancy follow-up. He noted that teachers who actively participated in a creative planning process often arrange classroom furniture in traditional rows after construction, simply because it is familiar. A solution: meet with teachers early in the school year, and recall the principles from the planning phase; then roll up your sleeves and help them re-arrange the furniture! According to Sanoff, after a few minutes of furniture moving, teachers recall their earlier excitement from the visioning process; the meeting room empties, and each teacher goes to their own classroom to arrange the furniture in an optimal learning environment.

"School Design," by Henry Sanoff
      "...the expert is the least able to create anew idea, since the problem is often described in the technical terms of the expert's language, which makes it impossible to view the problem in a new way.
     "...the program usually relies on an idealized stereotype of the building's occupants. Institutional clients rely on building committees to advocate the user's point of view.  Such committees are often far removed from the needs of those who actively use the building."
      "... workshops quickly gave us information for which we would have worked for weeks, and some of it we would never have discovered, buried as it was in people's personal feeling."  reviews, pricing or purchase

updated January 12, 2001