Cleaning House
Bruce A. Jilk

The following is a personal reflection on the Ed Spec, a product of a planning process that becomes the base of a school design concept. First here are two thoughts:

1. At the UIA/UNESCO conference in Porto last year, architect Anton Schweighofer (Austria) stated that good learning environments would be the same as good libraries, good stores, or good gas stations. In other words, these places evolve out of broad set principles that are based on human qualities. Any document, Ed Spec, or what ever you care to call it, that frames the design of a learning environment around only a “functional” interpretation of a curriculum will lead to failure.

2. As I think back on the school projects I’ve been involved in over the years, the bigger the Ed Spec, the poorer the design. My best designs came from two- page Ed Specs (the Zoo School, Iceland) or one page (Finland). This points to what we would call the “Law of Inverse Returns.”

Reflecting on both of these thoughts leads me to the conclusion that the best Ed Spec is no Ed Spec! Let me start with a little history. I worked on my first real school project (in the trenches) in 1962. This was a new high school. There was no Ed Spec or Program. We just worked it out. This was my experience for the next ten years. In 1972 I went to work for Hammel, Green and Abrahamson. At that time they were the top school design firm in Minnesota. They also had a NYC office where they were doing “Store Front” schools.

For my 20 years at HGA we never (except toward the end) had more then a two or three page space program. Many of these projects were award-winning designs. The space program listed the areas for departments or clusters, but did not go into any more detail. Toward the end of that time I did one project with a detailed program. This was at the insistence of the principal who was a detail kind of guy. It took about 20 pages to list and size the rooms for this nearly 500,000 SF project. In about 1992 I did a middle school in the Chicago area that, at the demand of the client, included an Ed Spec. This was my first such project. It was mostly written by the teachers.

30 years doing schools without an Ed Spec and only a “sketch’ of a program! Why should we not think of doing a school project without an Ed Spec or program today? Ed Specs are something that is being imposed on school districts and architects by the educational facilities planners. This has become more prevalent in the last 10 years (I believe the Ed Spec concept is about 40 years old). It would be interesting to study the history of EFL in relation to CEFPI. One survived and the other didn’t. What if it had been the other way around?

“The institution of learning must have in its mind - must have in its sense - the realm of spaces which are good for learning, and not a program which says that you must have so many of this, or so many of that, but a realm of spaces which you feel is sympathetic to learning.” Louis Kahn

Here is how I see the problem: Ed Spec people (who certainly can make positive contributions) are experts in education who follow their “cookbook.” This is organized around functional aspects of the parts of a school. Many school architects, bonded to corporate profit goals, provide a service to put those parts together in a way that is also functional (cut and paste is like magic). The municipal sewer system is a good metaphor. Although schools need to be functional, they also need to be much more than that. Neither the “cookbook” nor the profit motive will support this higher need.

The next problem we have is this focus on the parts and not the whole. This is true of both the Ed Spec and cut and paste design. Schools need to be seen as a whole first, as parts second. In addition is the problem of the disconnect between the client (user) and the architect. The process of having specialists who collect information from the client, write it up and pass it on to the architect may be efficient but it is not effective. Finally, and in my mind most important, it is rare that you will find any of these players capable of understanding and designing to the relation between space and its effect on the behavior of learning. All of these things need to be fixed. Working together we need to create places that not only house learners; they need to be places that evoke learning.

“If you get a program from a school board, the first thing it will say, in our country, is that it must have a nine foot fence around it—wire fence—and that it must have stainless-steel doors and the corridors must be no less than nine feet wide, and that all its classrooms must be well ventilated and have good light and all be certain size. They will give you many things which will help the practitioner make a pretty good profit out of his commission by following the rule of rules. But this is not an architect at work. An architect thinks of a school possibly as being a realm of spaces within which it is well to learn. I think schools, for instance, have now gotten away from the original spark of the existence will or seed of “school.” -Louis Kahn

We need to have accountability from school architects as well as facility planners. Therefore I would also like to comment on the architectural design of new schools. In a word, most school architectural design is repulsive. There are a number of factors behind this but the one I will address is the fragmented approach. This is driven by the Ed Spec tendency to focus on the parts. Design a gym block, an academic block, and an arts block. Throw them together (curved corridors are cool!) and you’re in business. Align the front masses and you might even get an award. This award can be assured if you dress up the facade with a pediment over the entry and some stupid brick pattern. A few pseudo columns with fat capitals won’t hurt.

This aesthetic works because this is a new variation on regionalism. I call it the Ubiquitous Suburban Style Regionalism (USSR—appropriate because school design today is like Russian housing of the cold war—no matter where it is, it looks the same). Next, make the school blend with big-box suburban retail, and no one will give it a second thought. This is better (and therefore the award) than the schools that don’t blend in and are painfully harder to ignore. Of course the thousands of parking spots in front are a no-brainer in this style of design. The other good news here is that those folks that have taken the “School as Prison” design approach are very passé. This is progress. We will take what we can get.

“One asks oneself how it became possible that man today is no longer able to create the very thing the great gift of consciousness should enable him to create: an environment in which he is able to live with dignity and assure survival without losing his identity.” -Aldo van Eyck

Some of our society’s values that have become of prime importance to educators revolve around the concepts of honesty, trust, integrity, and ethics. In light of recent news reports that range from students’ cheating on tests to the destructive behaviors of corporations like Enron and Arthur Anderson, it is no wonder that schools feel compelled to emphasize these values. School architects and educational facility planners need to model the highest level of these values as well. Although we have good intentions, I believe we have been sweeping our share of dirt under the rug. It is time to clean house!

“To thy own self be true” Shakespeare

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