Education: The Wrong Kind

U.S. educators and architects have long been agreed on at least one point: the nation needs new schools. But, said ARCHITECTURAL FORUM this week, “it is a sad—and little recognized—fact that the pitifully inadequate supply of taxpayer’s dollars is, in most big U.S. cities, being spent for the wrong kind of schools.” To show what it meant, the FORUM devoted its entire October issue to the U.S. school.

As an example of poor planning the FORUM picked New York City. The big town has 900 school buildings and a third of them are more than 50 years old. In this antiquated group 280 buildings are not fire-safe, and 250 have inadequate plumbing. In many neighborhoods now heavily populated by new housing projects there are no schools at all. But some schools are now much too big; their neighborhoods have shrunk as population shifted.

New Numbers. The trouble is, says the FORUM, that New York makes no provision for changes in population. Most of its schools are planned by the Board of Education’s Construction Bureau, which sticks by its oldtime architects and methods. As one former bureau architect put it: “When a program for a new school came through, we used to riffle through the drawers, find something that looked suitable, and accomplish the tremendous design job of changing the numbers on the old plan.”

The result, says the FORUM, is that “New York is putting millions of dollars into 1,000-pupil elementary schools —many of them in areas where [population analysis] raise serious doubt as to permanency of need. They are all built to last at least 50 years, but they show scarcely a trace of the design revolution of the last two decades.”

In feckless planning and design. New York City is not alone. Throughout the U.S., school boards are putting up the wrong kind of schools. They spend thousands of extra dollars on belfries, balconies, Grecian columns, fake chimneys, and dummy dormers. They balk at the idea of the unpretentious one-story schoolhouse to which rooms can be added as needed.

Old Codes. The more progressive school boards that do look for new designs are often hampered by outmoded building codes. Some states still insist that windows be placed only on one wall. Regulations for ceiling heights, says the FORUM, are often “predicated on ventilating theories proved erroneous in 1863.”

How can this waste of space and money be halted? The FORUM has a few suggestions. First, rooms should be big, but they should also be flexible. By moving partitions and furniture, a classroom should be capable of being turned from the “English room” to the art room to the geography room in a matter of seconds.

Poor Cousins. Furthermore, says the FORUM, the public should treat the school crisis as a permanent one; “instead of handling ‘temporary’ schools as poor cousins, so badly built and maintained that children rightfully hate to go to them, we should set out to produce temporary schools of top quality.” With up-to-date techniques, including prefabrication, a community can build an attractive new schoolhouse quickly and cheaply. When the time comes to remodel, rebuild, or abandon the school entirely, no large investment has been wasted.

Schoolmen themselves, says the FORUM. should study new methods of building, heating, lighting and ventilating. Instead of monumental, blocklike buildings, the modern school should be small and informal, neither too forbidding for its pupils to go to, nor too cumbersome for its principal to run. Its rooms should be cheery and colorful as any parlor, as sunny as any porch. All this can be accomplished, says the FORUM, if school boards follow the rules of common sense. Rule No. 1: hire a good architect.