Posts Tagged Schools
John Bancroft obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 21, 2011
Architect of the brutalist landmark Pimlico school in central London
Sometimes a single building becomes the focus for an architect's endeavours and reputation. For John Bancroft, who has died aged 82, that building was Pimlico school. Not only did Bancroft design and see this striking landmark of the 1960s through to completion, he also waged an unremitting and lonely struggle for more than a decade to save his cherished creation from destruction, to no ultimate avail.
Pimlico was political from the start. A monument to the comprehensive schooling policies of the Inner London Education Authority and the architectural vagaries of the Greater London council, it was imposed in 1967–70 on a razed and open urban block in the heart of Tory Westminster. A little earlier, and a school in a tower block might have faced off against the surrounding stucco terraces. But by the mid-60s the experts knew what children could do in and to lifts. So Bancroft, the GLC's inhouse job architect, opted for a walk-up building of four storeys only, linear and compact, with a stepped section to maximise daylight. The lowest storey was sunk to the levels of the former townhouse basements. Out of this pit, like a creature in a zoo, grew the concrete-and-glass school, glaring at the rectangle of streets all round. Boxy projecting classrooms with canted glazing, supposedly self-cleaning, completed the brutalist effect of provocation.
Unluckily for Bancroft, Pimlico school was out of date when it opened. Educational ideas change fast, and he had been handed an outdated brief. The bigger spaces worked well, but the classrooms were inflexibly shaped and grouped, while the double-height concourse that was the school's heart was never put to full use after the departure of the enthusiastic first headteacher, Ken Green. Worse, the heating and cooling system was rapidly vandalised, and no lasting solution to the extreme solar gain in the classrooms could be found.
Pimlico soon earned itself a reputation, especially in music and drama, but did so despite its remarkable building, not because of it. When Westminster council, casting greedy eyes upon the site, decided in 1995 to redevelop half of it with luxury flats and create a smaller school on the other half under a PFI scheme, the idea proved hard to combat. Bancroft, by then long retired but always a doughty campaigner, summoned up influential architectural allies and saw the first scheme off, maintaining that simple changes could renew the school. But he was hamstrung by his inability to get Pimlico listed, ministers taking the expedient view that inherent design faults impaired its architectural value. The last remnants of Pimlico school disappeared this year in favour of a faceless substitute.
Bancroft was born in London and brought up in Nottingham. His civil-servant father was an amateur painter and also collected books, a passion which John fully inherited. He started as a draughtsman in a brewery, where someone noticed his talent and persuaded his father to pay for his training at Nottingham University. After national service at Chatham in Kent, he worked for the local borough council there before moving in 1954 to Crawley Development Corporation, in Sussex.
His ambitions took off only when he joined the schools division of the London county council's architects' department in 1957. There, John caused amusement by wearing a smock at the drawing board, but proved his credentials with designs for Elfrida Rathbone (now Haymerle) school, in Peckham, and an extension to Philippa Fawcett college (now Dunraven school), in Streatham. After Pimlico, he was shunted into an administrative role in the housing division, and retired early in 1980.
Though loyal to the public service and collective ethic, Bancroft was at heart an individualist who regarded his calling as a high art with spiritual aims. Critical of most architecture of his day, as early as 1973 he announced, "I am a Victorian at heart." True to his word, he was active in the Victorian Society. Under his leadership a clique called the Dinosaur Five gingered up the GLC in 1979 to oppose a plan by the Natural History Museum to destroy the side galleries of their Grade I-listed building. The campaign's climax was a cake baked in the shape of the museum, from which Spike Milligan cut the threatened galleries before the attendant press. An alternative scheme devised by Bancroft helped save them.
During his retirement he was involved in the restorations of HMS Warrior, then at Hartlepool and now at Portsmouth, and of the SS Great Britain at Bristol. He also designed premises for Howes' Bookshop at Hastings, the source of many acquisitions decking his walls at Haywards Heath in Sussex.
John was a gravel-voiced character with streaks of grit and obstinacy but liberal views and a saving sense of humour. He is survived by his fourth wife, Janet, and by a daughter, Sarah, from his second marriage.
• John Bancroft, architect, born 28 October 1928; died 29 August 2011
Architects do matter, Mr Gove
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 6, 2011
The education secretary claims architects have 'creamed off' money that could have gone to teachers. It's time he opened his eyes to the far-reaching benefits of a beautifully designed school
If Michael Gove were a building, he would leak. He would crack and crumble on faulty foundations. He would be windy, but also overheat. Behind a pretentious facade, he would be shoddy in design and execution.
So far, the secretary of state for education has had to apologise for the hasty and inaccurate way he announced the cancellation of school building projects, and been told by a judge that his failure to consult was "so unfair as to amount to an abuse of power". He keeps giving not-quite-true information to Parliament, for example that a college in Doncaster, a pilot project of the government, took an impressively short 10 weeks to procure. It actually took 22 weeks.
On 14 February he told the House of Commons that "it's a scandal… millions of pounds were spent on consultants" on the design of new schools. "One individual, in one year, made more than £1m as a result of his endeavours." This might be an impressive fact, were it not that he is referring to a case in Birmingham in which the sum was £700,000, was paid over four years and covered the work of five advisers at different times, as part of a programme of more than 80 schools, costing more than £1 billion.
Yet Gove presses on, seemingly untroubled by evidence, common sense or decency, with his campaign to lower the quality of the buildings in which the nation's children are taught. He has repeatedly attacked architects for "creaming off" money that could be better spent on teaching. He recently smirked to a conference that "we won't be getting any award-winning architects" to design new schools, "because no one in this room is here to make architects richer". The message is that a well-designed environment is an irrelevance: teaching is all that matters.
There has been talk that schools can be churned out in bulk, the way Tesco builds its supermarket or McDonald's its outlets. To dot the country with standardised McSchools is not obviously consistent with the government's localism agenda, or its interest in a "happiness index", but never mind. One contractor, Willmott Dixon, has punted some suggestions as to what such schools might look like. These look plausible, if drab, on unencumbered, level sites. But, like Daleks encountering a staircase, they need help when they hit a slope, or a constrained urban site, or the individual needs of particular schools. Standardisation has its uses, but it needs design to do well.
To Gove's rejection of design, Phil Blinston, executive head of the Minster School in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, says: "It's bizarre. I just don't get it. Why wouldn't we want to factor in everything architects have learned from other buildings? Youngsters are growing up visually articulate. Why would they not expect to see that in school? Why would you expect them to lower their standards?"
The Minster School has been using an award-winning building for four years, designed by architects Penoyre & Prasad. Blinston says: "Our results were good and continued to rise with the new building. Our behaviour has improved." It has good acoustics and natural light, which "have a profound effect on the emotional state of children, which helps their learning".
Its circulation works smoothly, without "one-way systems, keep left signs or massive numbers of rules". Hidden spaces "where vulnerable kids fear to tread" are designed out, so you don't need "people standing guard". It is designed so that locals can use the building in evenings and school holidays, so this public asset is used to the full.
"I'm not talking about fancy architecture," he says – and a limited budget means the school has a simple-going-on-basic look – "but it's about enabling people to feel good. Good design produces a relaxed community. If we say education is important, we can demonstrate that by putting children in decent environments." Buildings cannot do a teacher's job, in other words, but they can make good teaching better and bad teaching less so.
To which it might be added that, if environment were irrelevant to learning, then Eton College, the alma mater of many of the present government, would sell its agreeable slab of Berkshire real estate and move to low-cost units in a business park in Slough.
Gove is very much right about one thing, which is that the last government's £55bn Building Schools for the Future programme, which aimed to rebuild or renew nearly every secondary school in the country, was a monstrously wasteful and cumbersome process, which often led to very poorly designed schools. The "creaming off", however, was not being done by architects, who were, instead, among the first to point out the faults of the programme.
The main beneficiaries were the financial institutions and their advisers who funded the programme, who will earn handsome returns and bonuses for years to come at the taxpayers' expense. They are followed by the big construction companies, several of which were fined in 2008 by the Office of Fair Trading for breach of competition law – ie price-fixing – on a range of project types. They were, to coin a phrase, creaming off the funds of clients, including local authorities.
This unfortunate blemish has not impeded the same companies from securing huge education contracts, and it would be stretching credulity to think that price-fixing never now happens in school building. Yet there has been no ministerial slap. Rather, Gove's architect-free vision of the future places ever-greater reliance on the men with the hard hats, the handshakes and the plausible paperwork.
There are also the lawyers who expensively write and rewrite the byzantine contracts, at hourly rates several times greater than architects', and project managers, who do less, and less useful work than architects for a similar total cost. Worst of all was the waste inherent in BSF's processes: it cost contractors up to £3m to bid for a package of schools. They would expect to win one in three, meaning that they would want to recover £9m from successful bids just to cover their bidding costs.
Gove's department is unable to produce the figures on which he makes his assertions, saying that "detailed data on individual projects was held locally to minimise the regulatory burden on projects and project reporting". It is, however, possible to find out that architects' fees have been between 2.5% and 5% of construction cost. If capital costs other than construction are included, this can drop to well under 2% of the total. If, as happened under BSF, future running costs are included in the contract, architects' fees become a tiny proportion. Most architects working on schools will tell you that it pays less well than almost any other kind of work and is sometimes loss-making. One says that schools work "is threatening to put us out of business".
In other words, in the torrents of waste surrounding school building, good architects are value for money. If budgets get tighter, we will need their skills to make the most of them. If, as seems likely, future work is more about refurbishment rather than glamorous new buildings, architects' adaptability will help. If there is more standardisation of new buildings, it needs design intelligence to do it well. Gove seems to think that architects are all bow-tied ponces longing only to inflict their fantasies on the public. They could be his greatest allies.
Why are we designing factory schools? | Sarah Wigglesworth
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 22, 2011
Michael Gove's rejection of decent architecture shows he knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing
At the recent free schools conference, Michael Gove said: "We won't be getting Richard Rogers to design your school. We won't be getting any 'award-winning architects' to design it, because no one … is here to make architects richer." The Con-Dems don't mind bankers getting richer, but demonise architects as freeloaders. They say the government supports localism, yet head teachers have been encouraged to choose standardised school designs. Once again, localism is exposed as a meaningless term that allows the Tories to attack Labour's record and pick on an easily vilified group.
Design is often thought of as a commodity produced only by a celebrity designer. In fact, it touches every aspect of our lives. Just like good management systems, good design helps processes run more smoothly and encourages participation and engagement by shaping space, light and sensations. Good architecture creates buildings that are loved by their occupants, simple to use and economical to run and maintain. In schools, pupils feel valued, more alert and more willing to learn. Staff feel energised, inspired and respected. The run-down Hackney Downs School used to be a sink school. Its replacement, Richard Rogers' Mossbourne Academy, is now home to astonishing results in terms of educational achievement and pupil behaviour. That's no coincidence.
Sadly, the government doesn't seem to regard the built environment as affecting our wellbeing. It is well documented that people who live in substandard housing suffer more illness and die earlier than the privileged. People recover faster in well-designed hospitals, tourists flock to attractive places and City firms' sleek, well-designed offices function more efficiently and attract talent to the Square Mile. If these are factsare true, then how can schools defy this obvious logic?
Having attended elite schools with superb facilities, our free school advocates seem unable to accept that school buildings have any effect on those that teach and learn in them. With little experience of state schools and scant knowledge of how buildings are actually produced, they are hasty in their judgments of the architect's role.
In the architect-free Con-Dem future, we can use catalogue designs to build cheap, under-sized state schools occupied on a rotational basis. People will care less about quality and more about profit margins and "shareholder value". But the factory schools of the future will have little regard for the appropriateness of the design to the school's educational aspirations – why should they? We are told that this is the teachers' responsibility. But the question remains: why would a teacher want to teach in such an environment? What message does it send to our kids? Both would soon know their place: they don't matter. How can this possibly aid learning?
In pursuing the current policy we could easily see another generation of disastrous school buildings destined to be rebuilt in 20 years' time. Professional expertise helps, and Gove should be seeking good design in any form, especially now that people are free to set up their own schools with no prior knowledge of how to do it.
There is nothing inherently more expensive about good design: buildings are complex and need experts to design them, and design fees are a tiny proportion of construction budgets. Building Schools for the Future was poor value for money not because architects' fees were high, but because of wasteful, cumbersome and bureaucratic procedures. It did create work for architects, but they are only the most visible part of a raft of consultants, contractors and managers. The focus should be on cutting that bureaucracy and focusing on what brings real value and innovation – an equation that has architectural design at its centre.
In the hands of talented architects and good clients, design can make places more pleasant to be in, improve absenteeism and ill-health and most importantly, make communities proud. These things are hard to quantify, but Gove, the zealot of localist ideology seeking a soft target to blame, counts the cost of everything yet understands the value of nothing. He should remember that design is at the heart of the problems he attempts to address.
Evelyn Grace Academy, Brixton – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 18, 2010
A Brixton school designed by Zaha Hadid contributes to the debate on education – mainly by being so excellent, writes Rowan Moore
Zaha Hadid is a celebrated architect. You have probably read the articles by now: most famous woman architect in history, Pritzker prize winner, forceful character, born in Iraq or possibly, if the journalist hasn't done their research properly, Iran. She has just completed her first school, a powerful, singular object in Brixton, south London, called the Evelyn Grace Academy, it serves Coldharbour Ward which, according to the school's principal, has the highest rate of violent crime in Europe.
As it happens, Hadid's office in Clerkenwell, central London, is in a former school building. It is one of hundreds built in a few years to the designs by Edward Robson, following the Elementary Education Act of 1870, which introduced universal free education. Robson created a basic standard design with simple architectural qualities – light, airiness, durability, good details and proportions – that could be varied and adapted to different sites. His schools became beacons of dignity in areas where there was little, and when some were eventually replaced, their innate qualities meant they converted easily into desirable flats, or design studios like Hadid's.
Both Hadid's work and her business premises are pertinent to the debate going on about the design of schools, prompted by the remarks of the education secretary Michael Gove and the waspish columnist-turned-education-reformer Toby Young. They claim that the last government's £55bn Building Schools for the Future programme was a monstrous waste of money, that architects "creamed off cash which should have been going out to the front line", that "the link between buildings and academic performance is practically zero", that "vainglorious architects" had inflated budgets with "extravagant fantasies."
Gove and Young make important points – that teachers matter more than buildings, and that Building Schools for the Future wasted much money – but spoil it with some gamma minus homework and a seeming delight in being boorish and ignorant. Young resembles a yapping attention-seeker in the back row of form IIIC.
They seem to be saying that it doesn't matter if children are educated in leaky sheds. They have also decided that architects are the main culprits of the failings of the Building Schools for the Future programme, when the main folly of BSF was the last government's grandiose decision to transform every secondary school building in the country, without much assessment whether this was the best way to improve education. It then created absurdly complicated and expensive contractual procedures, in which spending on architectural quality was cut to a minimum, with the result that very many truly terrible school designs were produced. The creaming off was done by contractors, financiers, lawyers and other consultants, not architects, and there was too little design, not too much. "A new loo seat is all very well," guffaws Young, "but does it have to be handcrafted by an Italian artisan? What's wrong with B&Q?", seemingly unaware that the chance of anything being handcrafted under BSF was remote.
Into the midst of this debate sails the stately form of the Evelyn Grace Academy. This is not part of the Building Schools for the Future programme, but is the result of different Labour policy – the creation of state-maintained but independently run schools called academies, whose construction costs would be partly sponsored by businesses and benefactors. If BSF schools were bought in bulk, academies were bespoke. The present government likes the idea of academies, if not their architecture, and wants to make more schools like them.
The academy is one of eight supported by ARK (Absolute Return for Kids), "whose purpose is to transform children's lives". This glamorous charity was set up by Arpad "Arki" Busson, hedge-fund multimillionaire and squire of Uma Thurman. Evelyn Grace is also individually sponsored by another hedge-fund manager, David Gorton. ARK's other schools include the Globe Academy in Southwark, south London, by Amanda Levete.
Peter Walker, principal of Evelyn Grace, stresses old-fashioned discipline and endeavour. Its ethos is to "achieve excellence" in "an industrious, orderly and respectful environment". It has a longer school day than most, from 8.30am to 5pm. It has uniforms – blazers, ties, V-necks – which pupils are expected to keep in good order. As we tour the school he calls children to order for standing in the wrong place or in the wrong way. But the strictness is also tempered: the academy, which will eventually have 1,200 pupils, is subdivided into four "small schools", so that children are not swamped by the vastness of the whole.
And then there is the building. On the breast pocket of the traditional-looking blazers is a traditional-looking shield within which a surprisingly constructivist crest appears, a leaning Z with a dot above it. This is based on the plan of the school which, with the dynamism for which Zaha Hadid Architects always strive, this thrusts diagonally from one side of the site to the other. Playgrounds and sports pitches occupy the spaces between the building and the streets on either side, with a bright red 100m running track stretching from one side to the other, the building bridging it at half way. As a proclamation of alertness to dozy morning arrivals, the track is hard to beat.
More oblique lines stride across the elevations, veering into curves where the building takes corner, and helping mark out the four "small schools". Inside, the building has a basically simple plan, with classrooms on either side of broad corridors, but rendered complex by the architects' irregular geometries and double-height halls serving the small schools at different levels.
The aims of the school and of the architects are not a perfect fit. Hadid's architecture communicates the seriousness and high ambition that Walker claims for his school, but it expresses the intimacy of the "small schools" less well. There's also a conflict between the flying angles and the rectangular shapes that classroom planning and economic construction tend to favour. In places it looks like a standard gridded building to which exotic geometries have been cosmetically applied.
What the building does best, says Walker, is communicate to pupils that "someone is valuing them". It is palpably exceptional, adult and unpatronising. You can tell that dedicated people have tried hard to do something out of the ordinary. It also creates moments of adventure and intrigue, such as the unexpected overlapping of spaces, which counter the potential boredom of big schools.
As to its contribution to the great schools debate, it can be taken as evidence for both sides, or neither. Young would count it among the "extravagant fantasies", as it was neither easy nor especially cheap to build (£36m, with a contractor pulling out in the process). Proponents of design would repeat Peter Walker's argument, that this is a piece of magnificence dedicated to children whose lives don't have much.
The truth is that the Evelyn Grace Academy is a one-off from an age that has already passed, when the City of London's firestorm of wealth threw off sparks of philanthropy to less lucky districts a few miles distant. It is not something that is repeatable for hundreds of new schools, and Young would be right not to hire Hadid or Norman Foster for the free school he is trying to establish.
But it is idiotic to conclude that spaces of learning are unimportant. Even if no connection can be proved between design and exam results, which is subject to debate, children should experience well-made spaces, just as they should experience art and music. The task is how to achieve this without extravagance. The search should be on for a new Edward Robson, an architect who could do this. The aim should be to find an updated version of the London Board Schools.
Gove, Young and the architectural profession should be on the same side. They should stop squabbling, find a bit of Evelyn Grace Academy discipline and work together. And if Arpad Busson wants to spend ARK's resources most effectively he should fund their efforts.
Letters: Historic schools
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 27, 2010
While impressive GCSE scores at the Barclay school in Stevenage were rightly the main story (Leaking roofs and crumbling classrooms can't halt George and Co's learning surge, 25 August), it's a pity that the piece repeated the pervasive myth that listing always stands in the way of work on a building, whether necessary repairs or alteration to suit changing needs. Many listed schools from every period have been adapted and modernised as educational needs have changed. Recent schemes for listed 20th-century schools, such as Richmond school in Yorkshire and Haggerston school in London, have delivered sensitive and effective refurbishment at a fraction of the cost of a new building, and this would be possible at the Barclay school too. Listing is there to flag up buildings of national special interest, not stand in the way of progress.
Jon Wright
Schools, museums and public loo: 2010 RIBA architecture awards unveiled
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 20, 2010
Schools triumph in the architecture industry's annual awards – as does a bus drivers' toilet in Dagenham
English Heritage issues SOS – save old schools
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 26, 2010
Conservation watchdog says more historic schools should be refurbished, not demolished
Britain's unprecedented rush to build schools is condemned today as a threat to hundreds of sound and thoughtfully designed buildings from an era when materials were high-quality but cheap.
MPs intend to grill the government's Partnership for Schools team about the ratio of rebuilding in the £20bn programme, which is supposed to see half the money go on restoring historic and often locally popular schools.
Instead, a survey by Building Design magazine has found that 70% of completed projects have been new-build, with timescales under the private finance initiative and similar schemes pushing local councils that way. The government's conservation watchdog English Heritage is up in arms and the culture department is expected to list more schools to shore up their protection.
The alarm is based on "quick-fix" bids from town halls to get public money, which overlook the value of pioneering work by councillors' predecessors.
Two new publications by English Heritage describe the progressive thinking and enlightened architecture which went into school building from the late 19th century onwards. The group has taken the unusual step of backing them with an opinion survey, which finds that 83% of people want old school buildings retained for new use. Almost half - 47% - say that historic schools are more inspiring for pupils and teachers than new ones, and 75% value Victorian and early to mid-20th century examples as local landmarks.
The issue is raising the temperature in local government, with Leeds' ruling coalition of Liberal Democrats and Conservatives defending a ward next month where passions are high over the closure and subsequent neglect of Victorian Royal Park school. Nationally, the Conservatives are suggesting links between the new-build bias and overspending and delays in the Building Schools for the Future programme.
Lady Andrews, chair of English Heritage, called the huge school investment programme "unique in scale and vital" but warned: "Local education authorities need to strike the best balance between replacement and refurbishment.
"The latter is often the more environmentally sensitive and effective solution. It uses the assets of the community, minimise requirements for new materials and cut demolition waste. It also helps to reinforce people's sense of belonging and local identity." Tim Byles, the chief executive of Partnership for Schools, the agency responsible for delivering the huge programme, is to be questioned about the new-build imbalance by the Commons' select committee on children, schools and families. He denied that refurbishment was "the poor relation of new-build. We are passionate about making best use of existing buildings and sustainable refurbishment projects." He recommitted the programme to achieving a 50-50 balance on completion. Elain Harwood, English Heritage's architectural historian, said: "We have some wonderful school buildings in this country, many with beautiful architecture and valuable social history. Demolition should be a last resort, and is a loss for us all."
The guidance document highlights successes in the building programme's minority of restoration schemes, such as High Storrs art-deco secondary school in Sheffield. The city council included the original 1930s buildings in the modernised school which has 21st century IT networks and better accessibility for the disabled.
Newly converted into classrooms
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 8, 2009
Could money be saved by turning empty office blocks, and even old Woolworths shops, into schools?
Bristol Cathedral choir school's principal, Neil Blundell, is striding along the corridor of the school's newest building, the Parsonage, when he spots a pupil leaning against the wall, shirt-tails peeping out from beneath his sweater. "Would you like to tuck that shirt in?" he asks firmly, adding: "And don't lean on that wall – it's only been up for eight weeks."
The wall is indeed only eight weeks old – because the Parsonage was until this year a completely open-plan building. It was, in fact, an office block. When the choir school moved from the independent sector to become an academy last year, it had to find room for an anticipated 300 more pupils. Because it sits on a cramped site littered with listed buildings – including the cathedral itself – a huge new edifice was out of the question, Blundell says.
Fortunately, there was an office block lying empty in one corner of the site. The block had been built for letting, as an investment, but no tenant had been found. In under four months – and for just £1.3m, against £25m for a new school – it was converted into a home for the computing, maths and foreign language departments.
From the outside, its pale cream knobbly concrete walls and grey slate roofs are reminders of its immediate past. Inside, the impression of still being in an office – children in uniform aside – is reinforced. Classrooms that could be meeting rooms open off white corridors; the ceilings are rather low; and there is little natural light.
The building has its problems. As an open-plan office, it was designed for workers evenly spread across each floor; the result is that the classrooms often overheat when pupils pack in for lessons. Because the building is next to a major road, the external windows don't open, and the relatively low ceilings leave no room to install further ventilation. As he pauses to look into a classroom, Blundell is told by one teacher that her room suffers from "really, really horrible" humidity.
However, he insists, taking over an open-plan building gave the school tremendous flexibility, and ventilation problems can be sorted out, just as the school dealt with the lack of light in classrooms – which have few windows – by painting everything in pale colours.
Blundell claims to have had only positive comments from parents. As for the pupils, they seem happy enough. "It's very smart, more modern," says Sam, a pupil in year 10, who seems far more interested in the new computers than the decor. "It doesn't feel like an office block now," he adds.
Although a new building "is always going to be better", Blundell says, "for this school, it was the right thing to do. I'm delighted with it. I don't think we could have got a better solution."
It's an idea that could become widespread. The Conservatives have already made it clear that, should they win power next year, schools will have to do more with less, swapping new buildings for converting old offices, church halls and municipal buildings.
Experts think it can be done: refurbishment and remodelling "already play a major part" in school building programmes, says Ty Goddard, the head of the British Council for School Environments. In future, "imagination and wise thinking" will be needed to make the most of what's there already, he adds.
In the US, schools are created from offices, supermarkets and, in a distinctively American touch, shopping malls. The Tories also point to Sweden, where the much-hyped free schools movement relies on companies starting up schools without any capital grants. Looking for cheap options, they will convert old military barracks, factories and even, in one case, a former observatory.
Steve Bolingbroke heads the UK operations of the company Kunskapsskolan, which runs over 30 Swedish schools in converted buildings. A year ago, he identified several sites in the south east of the UK as ripe for conversion – among them, somewhat staggeringly, London's BT Tower, previously known as the Post Office Tower.
Kunskapsskolan's interest was rebuffed, so it won't happen. But, Bolingbroke insists: "A school on top of the Post Office Tower would be a great place for kids to understand the geography of London. How great [that would be] – having a lesson about the geography of London while actually looking at it."
Others have equally ambitious schemes. Professor Stephen Heppell, of Bournemouth University, is working with Rotherham council on plans to turn the town's disused shops into schools. This would help to regenerate run-down high streets, and could be incredibly cheap, Heppell argues. He claims businesses will lease empty buildings for nothing as long as they are maintained – because that allows them to count the shops as assets on their balance sheet, and then borrow against those assets.
Under Heppell's plan, which the council has agreed to explore, an old Woolworths store would, for example, "make a very fine Da Vinci studio – you know, science and art [together]".
"If there's a change of government, and [school building] gets squeezed, this is a really interesting route for creating learning environments that are exciting – and that are value for money," he says.
Not everyone is convinced that the conversion model works. John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, has visited Swedish schools. "How companies make a profit is by taking over ex-public buildings, or indeed private buildings, and furnishing them to the minimum standard," he says. "It didn't look particularly good. It didn't seem appropriate."
Peter Clegg, of schools architects Feilden Clegg Bradley, says he isn't against the idea in principle, but he doubts it will work. Britain's archaic planning system makes changing the use of any building slow and complicated, he argues. For that reason, the Conservatives are already plotting changes to planning regulations "to make it easier to set up schools", a spokesman says.
But there may not be enough good-quality buildings – with high ceilings and excellent day-lighting and ventilation – available for conversion, Clegg says. "If we're looking at taking over crap buildings and turning them into schools, it isn't going to look very good."
Another problem with converting office blocks lies in providing playgrounds and sports fields. "Children need space outside," says Bangs. "You need playgrounds, you need areas you can convert to sustainable activities, like farms."
But in Sweden, Bolingbroke says, Kunskapsskolan hires out local council sports halls or uses other schools' facilities. Meanwhile, architects say schools could build playgrounds on the rooftops of converted offices. Although the combination of teenage children, sports equipment and a multi-storey drop may seem faintly alarming, in practice it already exists.
St Mary Magdalene academy, in north London, has a playground on its roof; as will St George's school, in Westminster, when it is finished next year. Its playground will be surrounded by a three-metre-high parapet wall and covered by a net to stop balls bouncing over. "You create quite a secure environment," says John Wood of construction firm Bouygues, which is working on the project.
Some parents may hate the idea of converted buildings, he admits. "Parents like to be reassured with gleaming new schools and state-of-the-art facilities." But, he adds: "All it takes is a few architects to create wonderful converted buildings. Then parents won't mind whether the kids are in an old office, factory or warehouse."
Sticks and stones: can architects be built in the classroom?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 21, 2011
The government wants your advice on rebuilding the cultural curriculum. So how would you nurture the Frank Lloyd Wrights of the future?
Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the greatest architects of the 20th century, learned the beginnings of his craft by playing with wooden building blocks. Many other architects did, too. But Wright was one of the very few architects who spoke thoughtfully, throughout his life, about childhood. Many architects since have been embarrassed by their youthful ways, and have presented themselves as fully fledged artists and professionals mature beyond their years.
And yet, one of the big problems in Britain – a country infamous for its visual illiteracy, or so say outsiders – is that architecture isn't taught to children, not much in the home, and much less at school. What an all-embracing discipline it is, though, for teachers and pupils alike: a fusion of art, maths, geometry, geography, physics, technology, politics, economics and environmental concerns.
So it is encouraging to see the government taking architectural education seriously. Ed Vaizey, the culture minister, has asked Darren Henley, managing director of Classic FM, to lead a review of cultural education. In launching the review, Vaizey stressed the point that all young people should have opportunities to take part in performance and visual arts and learn about Britain's cultural, architectural and film heritage.
Working with the Museums Association, Henley is asking anyone interested in his review to make submissions here by 20 May about how best to expand the cultural curriculum. If you are interested in nurturing an understanding of architecture in up-and-coming generations, send in your suggestions: the government might just act on them.
So how should an understanding and appreciation of architecture be approached in schools? Building blocks aside, how can we nurture not just the Frank Lloyd Wrights of the future but a public who will push these budding architects, rather than sniping from the sidelines that all modern buildings are terrible?
Children are naturally interested in architecture. Give them a stack of paper and ask them to draw a house, or ask them to build a sandcastle, and they will be very happy. They will enjoy making houses out of cardboard boxes, twigs, leaves, mud or stones. These creative skills should be encouraged beyond early education, because children have an innate understanding of the idea of shelter and dwellings, and they know how to make the buildings they create special. Architecture is itself a game, a high game of playing with forms (along with geometries, tricks of light and, of course, plans), and the greatest of all architects have never ceased to play; their sense of invention has been as fecund as a child's.
Teaching architectural interpretations of history is also a good jumping-off point. If you can interpret a building, of whatever place or era, you can read history. Children revel in tales of Egyptian tombs, pyramids, palaces, castles and magical homes: it is only a short gap between these delights, these fantasies and the whole world of architecture.
An appreciation of architecture doesn't mean that a child has to become an architect – a slow and expensive profession to enter – but it could, if only it was more widespread in Britain, make future generations feel more able to spur on, or deter, the best and worst architectural proposals, and even to commission intelligent architecture that will benefit everyone, from low-cost housing to spectacular art galleries.
Our desire to build, both to provide shelter and to celebrate who we are and what we dream of, is innate. Rather than complaining about contemporary architecture in a passive and ill-informed way, we should offer future generations the space to think how they might like to shape their world – the world of buildings that humans will always need. That might well begin, playfully, in the classroom.
Architecture, Art and design, Comment, Culture, Education, guardian.co.uk, National curriculum, Schools
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