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Michael Sharp 
This month the " Education Specification forum " was of great interest to me particularly in view of the procedures of the Victorian (Australian) Education Department where another level of bureaucracy has been introduced by out-sourcing the role of "project facilitators." The facilitators initial task is to help the schools write the" Ed Spec," prior to the appointment of the prime consultant, the architect. 

Having spent my whole career in education, a teacher, school council president, government facilities officer, and for the past fourteen year a private architect, specializing in educational, I fear the day when the architect is no longer involved in the formation of the Ed Spec. I believe educational design, as for all design should evolve out of the direct relationship between the client and the architect, in particular the user-client's unique aspirations and reactions to ideas and images as they evolve. The effective written brief if often only two or three pages comprising areas, functions and relationships, the real brief, the unwritten brief is the thoughts and feelings that have emerged from this critical relationship. 

Our State system is very centralized and controlled. Capital works projects are determined after master planning highlights discrepancies against a Standard Facilities Space Schedule. A project brief and budget based on set rates is established and frozen at the Detail Design stage after the prime consultant argues for additional special costs related to site issues, not educational issues. The user client, the school has some room to maneuver within the standards, that is to implement their Ed Spec, but all changes if approved must be within the set budget. The Ed spec is imposed on the Standard Brief and budget, not the reverse. The architectural brief should emerge for the Ed Spec. The brief is seldom initiated from educational philosophies, practices or aspiration.

Department briefs and approved educational specifications currently dictate the number, type, size and often the relationship of spaces. Practically all primary school classrooms designed within the last twenty years are substantially the same as were the" LTC", platoon type classrooms build in the previous twenty years. One room, one teacher, now for 25 children rather than 55. The opportunity to open up the spaces has been reduced to one operable wall between four rooms. Understandably architectural merit and awards are chosen as Prakash Nair suggests on the design of the entry and the curved wall rather that the educational quality or the function of the spaces. 

The simile of a greyhound race comes to mind; the direction, length and pace of the race is set; all you do is follow the lure and the fastest wins. If this is the case facility planning has gone to the dogs

Nevertheless having written the above, and having played all the above roles I understand the need, for Governments, the funding client, to keep the lid, so to speak on the whole process. After all it is our taxes at work, and the fundamental of state education, "equity", I believe is a desirable social goal. Twenty years ago before effective central controls were established and enforced individual schools did have more influence on school design, the results were often disastrous. Many of the badly designed buildings I must blame my own profession for failing to understand the essence of state education and pursuing firstly architectural solutions not educational solutions. 

So here lays the rub, the dilemma of state education, the age-old question of constraints and freedom. How do we balance equity or resources to achieve the predictability of outcomes as students fight for the same tertiary places yet encourage solutions better suited to all students? How can we best marry the constraints imposed by the bureaucracy with the needs of the individual school?

Michael Sharp 

The "USSR" comment is cute, but is the situation any better when a solitary designer is in charge of ed specs, program, design, details, specification, project management, and ultimate arbitration of what constitutes "success?" 

Let me take you on a tour of school buildings in my district where not only ed specs, but codes, staff, students, neighbors, and community were disregarded in the name of "creativity!" Designers have given us 7 foot corridor ceilings, window walled computer labs, windowless art rooms, entire floors without restrooms, 15 fc illumination levels, 9 inch stair risers without handrails, unmaintainable design features, and uncountable variations of non-functional classroom sizes and configurations. I can also show you "award winning" schools that are universally hated by staff, students, and community. Fortunately, we have had adequate resources to be able to extensively remodel many of these failed architectural experiments. Some masterpieces present us with no options but demolition and replacement. 

Does the design community honestly perceive these concerns as a "straightjacket?" 

Unfortunately, each of these abominations adds at least a sentence to our ed spec or technical standards. Please excuse school districts and our flawed attempts to "get it right the first time." Mr. Phillips, I wish you much success with your two pages of "generic goals!" 

It may be a minor point to some, but school districts have to live with the consequences. We are not in the business of fabricating stage sets! We are building for 40+ years here. During its lifetime, a school must serve scores of distinct parent-student "customer" populations through a dozen different principals and probably an equal number of curriculum concepts. Which group of customers should the building be designed to accommodate? Which staff? Which educational program? Which facility manager? I find it very revealing that both of the original essays by Mr. Jilk and Mr. Nair mention "design awards," and the "look" of a school. Is the success of a school really determined by appearance? Does anything about the school matter after the design awards are presented? 

No man is an island, but as a group, I believe design professionals gravitate toward the isolation end of the collaboration spectrum. Too many designers tend to eschew association with others to pursue their individual "vision." The idea of the creative individual in the ivory tower or studio loft is an engaging one, but in the discipline of architecture, I submit that we have but a handful of these true geniuses per generation. 

Perhaps ed specs should apply only to the mortal designers. 

Buckminster Fuller coined the term "synergy" to describe an end result that is more than the sum of its individual parts. Individual growing and learning experiences are an inescapable part of planning, design and construction. Most of these involve pain and misery, so the real synergy comes when others can benefit from what we have learned without having the direct experience. School districts have plenty of pain and misery to share, if anyone in the design community cares to listen. The ed spec is one of the few mechanisms we have to communicate this wealth of experience. Pardon me, but I refuse to apologize for our hard-earned (not to mention costly) "memorialization of good practice." Do we need to do better? Of course! 

Educational facility planners and their ed specs do not have a monopoly on school design excellence, but neither do the designers. We deeply share common objectives. The dispute is about how to best achieve them. I believe the critical issue is less one of creation and more one of collaboration. 

Successful school designs require a delicate synergy of many critical variables including visionary educators, engaged communities, adequate budgets, realistic schedules, high quality ed specs, and creative designers such as Mr. Jilk and Mr. Nair. 

As for the overall thrust of Robert’s comments, I disagree with his premise that the original piece about Ed Specs was intended to be a competition between owner appointed technical standards and so-called self-appointed geniuses.  Neither Bruce nor I have all the answers and, speaking for myself, I am humbled daily by the knowledge that I know so little of what there is to know.  Having said that, I will venture to say that neither should a school building bureaucracy pretend to have all the answers in perpetuating so-called standards in the name of "memorializing good practice".

Where does Robert get the idea that solitary designers should somehow substitute their judgment in place of Ed Specs? It certainly could not have come from the Ed Specs piece.  I do not advocate that and neither do I advocate that one designer's opinion should be taken as the basis for determining if a school is "successful" or not.

Let ME take you on a tour of school facilities designed with so-called standards in place. I can give you many more horror stories of the kinds of innovation that Ed Specs prevented than you can ever come up of bad design its absence caused.  Nobody will argue with any of Robert’s examples of bad design.  And guess what? Each example of bad design happened in spite of the Ed Spec that was in place at the time.  And, yes, I do believe that if the answer to bad design is to write a line of ed specs to protect yourself from future mishap, then absolutely you are putting a straitjacket on creativity.  If we took away one freedom for every violation of freedom in this country we would be living in the USSR.

If you have had problems with architects in the past, don’t try to "architect-proof" your future schools but make sure you hire good architects instead.   It is not hard to find out the past record of an architect. Just talk to their clients or visit their schools after they are built and occupied.  This kind of thinking that we can just write a line of code every time there is a problem is what the horror or our standards based education has become. This is an insane attempt to "teacher proof" our classrooms - and see where this kind of thinking has taken our public school system.  As we have done to good designers, we have put a straitjacket on our teachers. What happens when this straitjacket is removed?  I welcome Robert to visit a Met School or High Tech High or a Downtown School or a Zoo School or a Harbor City International and he will see that customization and not a standards-based approach is the future - not just of schools, but also of the world itself.

We are not in the business of fabricating stage sets? Maybe that is precisely what we should be in the business of.  I will ask Robert to talk to one of this nation's most successful art/technology teachers Dave Master whose students tore down and reconstructed their classroom every year - shaping it in their own image.  That Dave Master built what is arguably one of the best animation programs ever in a poor inner city school and sustained the program for 17 years with skyrocketing student achievement is not a coincidence.  A good temporary solution that lasts for five years is better than a bad permanent solution that lasts for 40. 

Frankly, I don't care for the "look" of a school if Robert is defining that as the school's elevation.  Students experience Architecture and I fully agree that the purpose of a school design is not to win awards but to develop something that the user community will be thrilled with. Most architects will agree that having a satisfied user community is worth more than any award.

I agree that we should not be pursuing individual "vision" if that comes at the expense of the community's ability to reap the benefit of that vision.  On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with professionals and leaders setting out a vision and seeing if it is something that others can relate to. If I hire a brilliant brain surgeon, I wont be expecting him or her to take a poll of the hospital staff to decide how to operate on me.   On the other hand, I would expect to be fully informed of the alternative procedures that may be available so that I can make an intelligent decision.  Let's face it. This whole country rallied behind JFK's vision to put a man on the moon because they thought it was a good idea - was that a bad thing?

Mortal designers or not, the Ed Specs simply are a bad idea as long as they become a set of prescriptive standards that designers are subject to before they even come on the scene. The world changes much faster than bureaucracies ever can adapt to.  That means, all an ed spec really does is ensure that yesterday's "best practice" is codified in tomorrow's schools.

There is a better way. Let caring people work together to decide what works in a given situation. In the process, let them consider the wealth of past information - including the successful and the failed history of the past - and let that information become the basis for deciding what a particular school should contain.  Should these decisions be memorialized in some form of written document. Why not? Should it be called an ed spec? Why not?

Let me end on a note of agreement. If Robert's point is about collaboration then he will not get an argument from me and, I suspect, neither will he get one from Bruce. Perhaps if there is one thing that sets our process for creating schools apart from the so-called traditional ed specs approach, it is collaboration.  Need proof? Please read Bruce's "Design Down" approach that he has used so successfully and please see the description of two recent schools I helped plan - Canning Vale High School in Perth and Reece Community School in Tasmania.  I will venture to say that the solutions that came from these processes are far more robust from the perspective of surviving future user communities than you would get from so-called prototypes developed from Ed Specs.

Aside from increasing enrollment and the deterioration of worn-out World War II era buildings, the most significant force for new educational facilities has been litigation. Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming have been forced by lawsuits to address the problem of the traditional lack of state support for school construction. 

A report prepared by the National Governor's Association Center for Best Practices, entitled " Building America's Schools: State Efforts to Address School Facility Needs" outlines the actions taken by various States in support of school facility construction programs. Released in June 2000, the Report indicates that, of the 43 states responding to the survey, 36 had some form of state level financial support of school construction. 

The website of the Educational Design Institute at Mississippi State University provides links to twenty nine state educational agencies that publish facility planning guidelines. The review of these twenty nine "guidelines" may be an appropriate dissertation topic but I'm not about to do it. I am willing to bet, however, that they include many of the items that we consider to be ed specs.

Early in the discussion, Prakash Nair observed that he has found the requirement for ed specs has been written into law in many states. Here in New Jersey, the ed spec requirement is established in the New Jersey Administrative Code which requires that written ed specs be part of the school construction project application and that they include, among other things, " ... a building space program that indicates the number and area in square feet of each instructional, specialized instructional, administrative and support space.

On July 29, the Governor signed an Executive Order requiring that all proposals for school construction projects include the LEED guidelines developed by the US Green Buildings Council. An Executive Order of the Governor!

It is not a giant step to anticipate that, as the level of state financial support for school construction increases, a call for greater "accountability" and control will come from state and local politicians and the public and the "guidelines" will become statutory requirements. In this scenario, a discussion of the merits or constraints of ed specs, as we currently define them, becomes an academic exercise. 

I think that those of us involved in the planning and design of school buildings should take ten deep breaths and look in a mirror. The position that design problems, such as those listed by our friend in Colorado, are solely the responsibility of the architect does not hold water. (It sounds to me like somebody on the client's side was not paying attention.) By the same token, I share Mr. Matschulat's reactions to Bruce Jilk's condescension that ed spec people get in the way, although they may be capable of making a positive contribution. It is interesting that while criticizing facility planners, Jilk believes that most school architecture is repulsive and blames that on the "ed spec tendency" to deal with a fragmented approach to design. Could it be that some architects find it easier and more profitable to reach into their files for a gym block or a classroom block? 

For my part, I believe that architects are becoming overly involved in the planning phase of the school that they will eventually design. I would quote the Design Share Watershed article in which Bill DeJong observes: 

"Architects can be very constructive in helping school boards move to an understanding of the importance of school design to learning. But we have to be very careful here. Is the architect telling the client what learning should take place or how students should learn? That should be the client's job. The architect should be providing design solutions to meet the objectives established by the client."

I think that Michael Sharp has stated the problem perfectly when he points out the conflict between bureaucratically imposed constraints and the needs of the individual school. I also believe that the trend toward increasing regulation is a reality and architects will be forced to respond to educational code requirements just as they do with construction related codes. 

My reaction - deal with it.

Educate the client. Make sure you conceptualize what they say they need and then draw the hell out of it.

section 3 >

Dear Readers,

Please direct your comments to the editor, or to the commentators and copy the editor.

Randy Fielding, Editor, fielding@designshare.com, bio

Bruce Jilk, bajilk@attbi.com, bio

Prakash Nair, Prakash@designshare.com, bio

Henry Sanoff, henry_sanoff@ncsu.edu, bio 

Jeff Phillips, jeff.phillips@eddept.wa.edu.au

Jack Flynn, jflynn6222@aol.com 

Michael Sharp, michael.sharp@baldasso-cortese.com.au 

Robert Matschulat, AIA, CSI, CCS, CEFPI rmatschu@jeffco.k12.co.us 

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