Conversations on Educational Architecture
Second Conversation: Under the Veranda
Jamieson and Fielding

Part of a series of Letters between Peter Jamieson and Randy Fielding

Introduction | Letter One: Synchronicity | Letter Two: Under the Veranda | Letter Three: Yesterday’s Problem

Dear Randy,

I was driving to work a few days ago listening to the radio. There was a report that an architectural company with which l have had a slight professional association has won the tender to oversee the development of one of Australia’s most famous and finest streets – Hastings Street, Noosa. You might have heard of Noosa. It’s a ninety-minute drive north of Brisbane and a popular beachside location that draws international celebrities who visit our shores. Hastings Street is a low-level precinct combining shopfronts, restaurants and other stores set amid lush tropical plants with walkways between the buildings leading directly onto the beach. It’s a very special place.

On hearing this news my first reaction was “no master plan, please”. Hastings Street is not perfect, don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of changes one could make. Perhaps? But there is a danger too, I think, in rationally constructing the ultimate, overarching professional design in a way that might bleed it of all of its life, including its imperfections. Master plans always seem to belong to the experts, never the inhabitants of a place. I think that’s what I detest about the multitude of newly constructed café precincts and plazas that are appearing in Australian cities. The design strategy is based on developing an instant precinct of apartments and up-market boutique shops fringed by cafes. But it all seems as authentic as a theme park, as if the creator of the ‘master plan’ has decreed, ‘this is where people will congregate to enjoy life passing by’. I prefer life and the patterns in which we live to evolve more organically, over time. I think that’s the attraction of the piazzas you were referring to. The present-day visitor feels a deep and abiding connection with those who have lived in those spaces before them.

There is something about beachside life in affluent Western locations like Noosa that evokes a quiet comfort and encourages unselfconscious expression. I enjoy the stark juxtaposition of the celebrity architect-designed clifftop home set alongside an old fibro-cement sheet shack cobbled together by its original owner decades ago. At the seaside city-dwellers like me are more directly confronted by the magnitude of nature than normally occurs in our regular lives. I think this is what gives rise to the variety of ways in which people live and house themselves at the beach. I am also reminded that the most impressive beachside housing I have seen were fishermen’s shacks in Bali. Constructed on thin wooden poles driven into the sand, these modest dwellings housed multi-generational families who slept mostly under the thin verandah roof, with fishing nets strewn over the sides and the wooden fishing boots sheltered underneath. No ‘master plan’ created these simple fishing villages, just a natural response by people living their lives as they must. What has any of this got to do with our conversation on educational architecture?

In my time as an educator – in high schools, vocational education and several universities – I have always seemed to be living within someone else’s ‘master plan’ with no opportunity to express myself professionally. The buildings and the spaces at my disposal generally have been an impediment to my practice as an educator. I often find that one of the major problems with educational architecture is that it is over-designed. It is as if the architects have felt compelled to show the full range of their talents as they design every solution to every possible problem or situation they, or the client (usually not the teachers themselves), have imagined. It’s really their ‘master plan’ to shape the practice and experience of others.

When I am working with academic staff to design their curriculum I frequently cite my favourite mantra “less is more”. My point is that academics are too concerned with jamming courses with content and burying students in it in a desperate attempt to keep up with the evolving field of knowledge in their discipline. It’s an impossible task and pointless trying to achieve it. Instead, I feel that the best curriculum design provides the framework for learning, setting a context and suggesting certain possibilities. But, most importantly, it should offer space within which the students can move, assert themselves and grow. It should provoke engagement so that students create outcomes that were not imagined when the initial ‘ingredients’ were included in the curriculum recipe. And it should contain challenges for the teacher to extend their own performance in various ways.

I think this is how we should approach the design of more effective educational environments. The most exciting possibilities contain an element of risk. Educators and architects have to be prepared to not get it ‘right’ all of the time. Our fear of getting it ‘wrong’ has us approach our work in familiar ways. We produce answers only to the questions we are prepared to ask, the questions that won’t embarrass us or challenge our standing as professionals in our respective fields. I want educational architecture that promotes possibilities (even if I, as the user of that space, might not be immediately aware of what they are), rather than presenting me with a design solution to a teaching and learning situation(s) that has been preordained in the planning process (which usually does not include me, the educator using that space).

I am delighted to hear of the innovations in educational architecture taking place in Australia that you described. Perhaps they will produce examples of more effective teaching and learning environments that we can showcase? There is nothing more effective than exposing others to different environments that can impact all of their senses. Educators are not very good at reading architectural plans so that they instantly come to life. We need a range of new spaces that can have an impact when presented to a visitor. Then the challenge will be to increase the general awareness of these developments amongst educators more broadly and, even more importantly, senior administrators, politicians and anyone else who has control of how we spend our funding in this area.

In fact I must tell you about a presentation that recently took place as part of our university’s ‘teaching and learning week’. Amazingly, we held two seminars dealing with the development of teaching and learning spaces and the campus environment. These events were really a follow-up to the seminar you convened at UQ in September, so I can comfortably assert that this institution is seriously engaging in the design and development of educational environments. Best of all, we are developing effective working relationships amongst our senior administrators, academics, technical and facilities staff – no small achievement!

For me, the highlight was an account of the development of a suite of new Chemistry teaching and learning laboratories. I think they represent a major step forward in providing state-of-the art learning environments for science students who generally have had to labour in dreary, decades-old facilities long past their use-by date. I know that one of the requests l get most often is to identify new and effective science laboratories or practical work areas that other institutions can learn from. Alas, I have frequently failed to provide any suitable examples.

Although the new laboratories are a refurbishment of an existing floorspace and have to overcome inconveniently located pillars holding up a very large building, the architects have created a wonderfully spacious environment that makes you excited just to enter the area. You will be pleased to note that the Chemistry academic staff were integrally involved in the design process and in fact drew on a development at a local secondary school to inform their own solution. I have watched tutors convening sessions, and spoken with the largely first-year students, and there is a palpable sense of excitement about ‘doing science’ in an environment that conveys a sense of what science in the 21st century involves. With this suite of laboratories I believe the university is confirming for students that it values their involvement as students and that it is prepared to properly resource their learning experiences. But what message we were sending to earlier groups of students who had to suffer significantly inferior facilities?

Which makes me want to ask you Randy, ‘How do you remember the classrooms and schools from your own education? What affect did they have on you as a student?’

For now, regards from Oz.

Peter

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Dear Peter,

Agreed! Let’s capture the essence of a beachside setting in an educational setting — “the ambience, the difference existing side-by-side, the rich range of possibilities, the experimentation.” There are at least a couple of distinct ways to approach this challenge. Perhaps the most straightforward is to affirm that the beach is already there, available as a learning setting at no charge! I’ll respond to this approach first, and then circle back to the implications of interpreting the beach in a dedicated learning environment.

In describing the beach as a learning setting, I’ll also answer the last questions in your letter: “How do you remember the classroom and schools from your own education? What affect did they have on you as a student?”

I experienced the classroom as prison-like. During my last two years of high/secondary school, I obtained a pass to get out of school at noon instead of 3 PM. Passes like this were typically granted to students that needed to work to support their families. I came from a middle class family, and although I had a series of jobs, I wanted out because school was not the right learning setting for me.

I needed the rich range of possibilities afforded by a beachside type environment. Not only did my school fail to offer this, but so did my suburban neighbourhood. I worked three afternoons per week, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I often hitchhiked or took the train into New York City. The city was my “beach.” I sometimes walked from the southern tip of Manhattan all the way to Harlem to the north. I visited galleries, museums, parks, and cafes. I learned that people wore neutral colors on Wall Street and hot colors in Spanish Harlem. I learned that many of the older building were better loved then the new ones.

This was the late 60’s — the era of Woodstock and “peace and love.” Today I would not allow my daughters to hitchhike, and I would not recommend that high school students wander all over Manhattan unsupervised. However, the Met School in Rhode Island took a wandering teenager’s path and turned it into a key part of the educational program. Students at the MET spend every Tuesday and Thursday outside of school as interns at a local business or civic organization. The message is that the best solution to a stimulating learning environment may involve community connections and partnerships rather than construction.

Now, on to interpreting the beach in a dedicated learning environment: you hit on one partial solution, which is to avoid over-designing. However, your favorite mantra, “less is more,” is just as often used as an excuse for rigidly bad design as it is for thoughtful restraint. The saying is attributed to the modernist Bau Haus designer Mies van der Rohe. He believed that buildings should be pristine vessels, devoid of ornament or any unnecessary design elements (be gone window seats, alcoves and turrets!). He led the charge to glass and steel boxes that dominated the world’s urban landscapes in the 60s and 70s.

Twenty years after van der Rohe said “less is more,” Robert Venturi proclaimed that “less is a bore,” in his book, “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.” Venturi advocacated for a more complex, beachside type environment. He was part of a movement that spawned post-modernism, an eclectic design style that ranged from wildly original to gaudy historical pastiches. The world of architecture was embarrassed by the undisciplined pastiches, and has moved back to a hybrid approach that includes both disciplined modernism and personal, contextual, place-based design.

When does “less is more” work well for educational environments? One good example is the brick and timber framed factory buildings of the early twentieth century. I first encountered these when I wondered the streets of New York in the late 60s, and witnessed the burgeoning of SoHo, the gallery district south of Houston Street. These solid, boxy brick buildings with high ceilings, big windows, wood floors, and timber columns and beams are always in demand. Most began their lives as warehouse or manufacturing buildings, then became warehouses, then artists studios, offices, residences, and yes, schools and university spaces!

I had the pleasure designing a school in a 1860s building in the industrial city of Duluth. Unlike the sterile containers of many Mies-inspired structures, the tall arched windows, textured brick walls and timber columns set the stage for a responsive learning environment, 150 years after the original structure was built. “Setting the stage” might be the idea that you are getting at. Prakash Nair’s letter about black box theatres and Dave Master’s animation studio explores this theme with gusto (link).

For now, best wishes from Lake Harriet

Randy

Part of a series of Letters between Peter Jamieson and Randy Fielding

Introduction | Letter One: Synchronicity | Letter Two: Under the Veranda | Letter Three: Yesterday’s Problem