Prakash Nair:
Response to Robert T. Matschulat
8/31/02

I respect the passion with which Robert argues for the Ed Spec and commiserate with him for the problems he has faced with bad architectural design. I will say this much about the Ed Specs he is so much in favor of. If they are simply presented as a guideline that the team developing a new school should consult, I’m ok with them. But I do not agree with the idea of mandatory Ed Specs.

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.

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