D/b: How did this thinking come to shape the building?

PN: They felt that if the learning is flexible, then the places in which the students learn also needed to be adaptable, for the simple reason that programs could change, curricula could change, but the building would be less likely to change. So they decided to build the spaces around activities which tend not to change, including small group learning, individual learning, learning with technology, performing, and presentations. They figured that if you built a school around activities as opposed to the curriculum, you’re much more likely to have spaces that support the idea of adaptability and flexibility. What we ended up creating were spaces that were able to be redefined by the student population as needs dictated. On any given day, if you go into the school, the spaces might look different because on that particular day the activities that the students engaged in require a different configuration of furniture, a different configuration of the way the rooms are set up, whether a flexible wall is open or closed — situations where the occupants make the decisions as opposed to the architect. In fact, the day the school formally opened, Tasmanian premier Jim Bacon held a live discussion with me in my New York office several time zones away. Projected on a giant screen in an auditorium seating 500 people, the conversation also became a part of the school’s distance learning program. And when the festivities were over, the “auditorium” disappeared to become multiple, active learning areas for dance, music, catering, sewing, and various other programs.

D/b: What has been the response?

PN: When the building was built, everybody, as far as I know, was really happy with what they got. The students really are in charge of a lot of the school, including the canteen. At one point 100 of us were visiting and the students planned the menu, purchased the items, and cooked and served the food. They learn by doing. They learn entrepreneurship. And they’re also working out in the community a lot more. You’ll see students leaving the school all the time to go do internships and community service projects. It’s much more seamless compared to the old fortress model where a school was a place where you locked students up for the day. The furniture is also quite different. The older grades have their own workstations, and they have ergonomic, soft seats as opposed to the hard plastic chairs that most students have here. This gives them a personalized space that they can go to and take ownership of and feel that it is their place. Most students are nomads in traditional schools, walking all around the place without any sense of their own location other than a locker, which tends to be an institutional sort of a place hard to make your own. But at the workstation you can lock up your backpack or laptop computer in your desk. It feels much more personal.

Then they applied for a James D. MacConnell Award, the highest honor for school planning and design, which is given to one school somewhere in the world every year by the Council of Education Facility Planners International (CEFPI), the largest and oldest school planning organization in the world. Only one school is recognized every year, and usually it’s very competitive. In 2003, when Reece Community High School received the award, it won over forty-nine other applicants. It was the first time any project outside North America had won that award. When I first met the community, I had suggested that if they did the things they said they were going to do, there was no reason they couldn’t be one of the best, top-line schools in the world and put Tasmania on the international map. They were very skeptical at that point because they had this sense that they couldn’t aspire to those high and lofty standards. But in fact that’s what happened. When we married the educational concepts that we knew were really relevant to this world with facilities that support them, the result was so unique that we won an international award as the best-planned school in the world. That’s a good thing for this community. But it’s sad that there aren’t many others doing that.

D/b: What will it take to get schools to become more progressive in their thinking?

PN: There are three or four forces in play today that I think will shape the future of education. The first is that the economy has changed quite a bit in the last ten or fifteen years. We’ve gone from a manufacturing-oriented economy to a knowledge-based economy and now we are moving qu ckly into a postknowledge economy. By that I mean that having a lot of knowledge and technical skills are no longer enough to be successful today. Let’s say that youwent to school and got a bachelor’s or a master’s in computer sciences. That’s not enough to guarantee a job anymore. The best programmer in India with ten years of experience can do the same job for onetenth of the money.

So we are moving very, very quickly into what we call the innovation economy, which means that the people who are going to really do well are the ones who can think quickly on their feet and be innovative and creative. That’s what America has always been very, very strong at. The CEOs of these big multinational corporations need more of a qualified, creative workforce in the United States in order for their companies to be successful. In the past, we trained children to be obedient and walk in a straight line. They made the best assembly line workers. They didn’t need to think for themselves. And we only needed about 4 or 5 percent of our population to be creative thinkers. But that is changing.

The second is that there is a greater expectation based on the rhetoric out there that all students will succeed. We’ve always been a society that’s allowed schools to be called successful or given a blue ribbon for excellence if 2 percent of its students are successful. Seventy or 80 percent of the population of the typical high school is anonymous and goes on to average, mediocre positions. And 50 percent of the students in urban high schools drop out, and some communities have dropout rates as high as 90 percent. So we’ve basically accepted mediocrity. We’ve accepted the notion that most students will fail while a few of them will become academic or athletic superstars. Now that model is changing because more and more parents are expecting that all children succeed. That is an unrealistic expectation that has been placed on schools that wasn’t there before. The third factor is a greater realization that, because change is happening so fast, academic learning in and of itself isn’t going to be enough to sustain you through turbulent times ahead. Colleges have begun to reflect this in their admissions policies. If you look at almost any top college in the country, you will see that they are moving away from using the SAT as the major source of deciding whom to admit, and moving more and more to a well-rounded background. You can find a student with a relatively lower SAT score being admitted because he’s really good at some special thing. So more and more colleges are determining that they can’t afford to use the old admissions criteria anymore.

I believe that in the next five to ten years you’ll see a massive restructuring of the way we approach education.

And finally, I think I have to take you through this analogy which I really like called the “committed sardine.” It says that society as a unit is not monolithic. It’s made up of millions of individual people, individual brains. The blue whale takes three minutes to make one 180-degree turn. A school of sardines that might be one million strong, on the other hand, can turn on a dime. At any given time there is a bunch of sardines swimming in an opposite direction, but they’re so small in number that you don’t see them. Over time they attract more and more sardines around them to swim with them, and once a critical mass is reached, which may be as low as 5, 10, 15 percent, the entire school turns and swims in the opposite direction. Our large bureaucracies seem to behave like whales because it takes them so long to change. But they really are more like sardines because they are all made up of individuals who can think for themselves. So the moral of the story is that the sardines in the world of education have been hard at work for the past twenty-five to thirty years, and even though their efforts might be invisible to the larger community, the forces have been building and building and building to where a critical mass is now being reached. I believe that in the next five to ten years you’ll see a massive restructuring of the way we approach education.

D/b: America seems to cling to one language, one version of history, one culture. If we need to reach out into a more worldly environment and are truly moving to a much more internationalized system, how do we make those connections work?

PN: You’re touching a subject very close to my own heart here. What we’re seeing is kind of like the last hurrah of a group of people who have basically one way of looking at things. The world has actually changed from under their feet, significantly, and the world has become more global. American schools have become more global. The American education system has become more global. And that has happened despite the people who still have power in this country and have basically set their foot down and said no, we will not tolerate that change. But the change is inevitable. You can’t fight it. This whole thing of America being an isolationist country is all very, very temporary. America has always stepped up and accepted its responsibilities and recognized its place in the world. And so on a positive note, I think that maybe in the next election cycle you will begin to see a whole different way of looking at the world. America is going to rejoin the world community, of which it is basically right now not a part. I think that education also is going to reflect that. Today education actually reflects that isolationist policy. Education reflects the failure to acknowledge that our system simply hasn’t worked. Rather than do more of what hasn’t worked, we should do something different. What we’re doing now is more testing, more hammering kids into submission, and all that kind of stuff. I think we are going to go away from that.

D/b: Can you talk about some of the things that architects need to know to build optimally for educational settings?

PN: I think architects need to forget everything they know about schools if they want to do a good school. And they should look not at trends, not at fads, but at the established principles that educators have generally agreed are going to be relevant for many, many years to come. I’ll give you a few examples. One of them would be personalization, and by that I mean learning that is personalized for every student as opposed to being mass-produced. The equivalent example of that would be what Dell Computers is doing. Even though Dell is a big manufacturing company and can sell thousands and thousands of computers, each computer is still tailored and customized to the user’s needs. It’s called mass customization, and if Dell Computers can do that, surely a school should be able to mass-customize education. So if you want to have 500 or 1,000 students in a school, at least make sure that each student gets a customized education.

D/b:And how is that translated architecturally?

PN: Architecturally it means that you cannot build a school simply to provide seats for 500 students. You need to look at it as if you are providing educational opportunities for 500 individuals. The spaces have to be very flexible, but by the same token, the spaces have to be very functional for what they are trying to do. If you make a space too flexible, then it might not be good for anything. The way we approach that is to take a given space and look at the range of activities the space can accommodate comfortably. The minute an activity is not comfortable to do in that space, we don’t do it there; we do it somewhere else. You may set up a classroom that is good for small groups, a large group, for individual study, and for presentations, for learning technology, to hold a seminar, or for distance learning. But if it’s not good to build something with your hands, not good to put on a small play, not a good place to eat, let’s go somewhere else to do that. You set up the spaces to be as flexible as possible, but only within the range of their still being functional.

We have identified twenty-five generic principles that we believe apply across the board. Each principle can be developed differently, given the particular context in which it is implemented.

This year my partner Randy Fielding and I will be publishing a book called The Language of School Design. We have identified twenty-five generic principles that we believe apply across the board. Each principle can be developed differently, given the particular context in which it is implemented. One of them is transparency, which is to say, don’t create closed-in, hemmed-in rooms that people feel trapped in. Instead, create a sense of connectedness to the outside, whether it’s windows looking outdoors or glass looking indoors. Another is this idea of natural light. It’s very important, particularly in North America, where kids don’t get enough daylight. We need to make sure that we really take full advantage of it by orienting the building for illumination as well as passive solar hot water and heating. A third has to do with the whole idea of community connectedness. In other words, you as an architect have to make sure that the building doesn’t become an unfriendly institutional place, but one that opens up to and allows the community to feel welcome. It also means that the students go out into the community. In fact there’s a school in New York that’s called the School for the Physical City where kids do internship work on projects related to the city’s infrastructure. That’s a tremendous learning tool. The city’s right out there. Why not use it to learn and make it part of your school?

[Interview originally appeard in DESIGNER/builder Magazine.]

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