SCHOOL LIBRARY The library planned for this school in the San Gabriel Valley will occupy the ground floor while maker labs will reside at the second floor. The feeling of embedment within nature is important to the school.
Early in our practice Steve once said: “we should be able to design a building in the back of a bus.” This struck me as entirely true and it has stuck with me since. While only slightly an exaggeration, what is true is that what we do is all in our heads (hearts and souls), and to the extent that it doesn’t get in the way, the setting isn’t all that crucial. The setting may influence what we think, make, feel and do, it may enhance or facilitate it but for the most part it doesn’t inspire or drive it. It in no way enhances our commitment to our practice or our resilience in the face of its inevitable failures.
5898 BLACKWELDER IN TRANSITION Even as our building undergoes structural and other renovations,
the studio goes on. We make do.
We know something about how Socrates taught mostly through his student Plato. According to Plato, Socrates professed to know nothing except that he knew nothing and that “learning” was only ever about asking questions, a constant pursuit. As far as I know we know nothing about where or in what setting Socrates taught. Perhaps crucially, he was supposed to have said that Athens was his classroom. Pictorial tradition and the popular imagination (or at least mine) have him placed with a group of students (or peers as he would have it) at the agora or in the shade of a tree under the Athenian sun. Not much else would have been necessary.
MINIMUM SETTING REQUIRED Whether it’s a conversation to get at the heart of a question, or a project to get something made, not a whole lot is required—perhaps the shade of a tree or the right tools.
HELLENIC GREECE Socrates, the original teacher in the western tradition, said Athens was his classroom.
Socrates’ student Plato went on to establish the Academy in the 4th century BC and fifty years later his protégé Aristotle founded the Lyceum. Then we got monasteries and cloisters, more academies and lyceums, then colleges and universities. Twenty-five centuries after Socrates we came to think of the teacher or professor as the possessor of knowledge (the smartest person in the room), the asker of questions only to the extent that students were tested on the knowledge the professor had imparted. Most of us experienced school in a classroom: a one-size-fits-all, assembly line, teacher-centric, student-as-passive-receptacle-of-information-to-be-applied-later-in-life kind of place. Not much went on in the classroom beyond listening, reading, writing and memorizing (to exaggerate only slightly)—and that’s all the classroom had to accommodate.
LEARNING BY DOING Traditionally less passive than active, learning was originally seen as a process of asking questions — sculpting or shaping one’s way to the root of an issue, or making something — sculpting or shaping one’s way to a result.
ROMANCING THE CLASSROOM With the rediscovery of antiquity in the western tradition, the settings within which the learned and the accomplished of the past were displayed became increasingly grand.
In the 21st century, educators from pre-school through graduate school say that more has changed in education in the last five years than the last fifty. These changes have centered around the growing realization that creativity, collaboration and resilience are those qualities of the fully participating whole person that will matter most. In the information age of today and perhaps the artificial intelligence age of tomorrow, those who will contribute most will be those who transform what little we individually know — through experimentation, sharing, failure and success — into something none of us yet knows. This is less something entirely new than it is a matter of emphasis and perspective.
ROMANCING THE TEACHER By the 20th century the teacher or professor had become someone authoritative, loved and feared.
ASSEMBLY LINE As great as the public education system in America has been, most would agree the time has arrived to rethink some of its most systemic characteristics.
LEARNING BY DESIGN The Stanford d.school was birthed in the 1970s. It’s increasing influence on the world of education is undeniable—perhaps inevitably given the influence of Silicon Valley on the popular imagination.
We seem to have rediscovered that making things (or “project-based learning”), whether in science or math, the humanities or art, individually or in groups is one of the best ways to learn. Traditionally the lab and the studio have been those places where this kind of (life-long) learning takes place. (The etymologies of the two words speak volumes: “studio” from the Latin studium, “place to study” and “laboratory” from the Latin laboratorium “place to work” or “work shop”). There’s nothing new about this except relative to what became the norm in schools in the United States in our lifetime — that norm perhaps being the exception rather than the rule. Socrates, we apparently do know, was trained as a stone mason.
LEARNING BY VOCATION Although the notion of school as a place within which to nurture a vocation is not new, the vocations are. (Above: The Anaheim Unified School District Magnolia High School (AUHSD) Center for Excellence project will accommodate a variety of programs in career technical education and training).
21ST CENTURY COMMUNICATION Less about books and periodicals than film and video, how we communicate going forward will focus more on imagery and the spoken word than words on a page.
SPECIALIZED LEARNING Those wanting to go into health and medicine will be able to start training as early as their teen years in this new facility that will train technicians in all areas of patient care.
The classroom of the future will incorporate more kinds of activities then when we adults were students. Its purpose will be to facilitate as many kinds of learning as we can imagine — even those we may not yet imagine. The classroom of the future will become more like the artists’ studio, the craftsman’s workshop and the scientists’ laboratory. It will blend the classroom, music room, wood shop, homemaking, science and art classrooms of our day. Its characteristics are simple: rectangular rooms of a certain size, well-proportioned and well-equipped. The length and breadth of the room, its furnishings, equipment and storage capacity will accommodate the variety of activities and informal ad hoc encounters that have come to occur every day in the dynamic, creative workplace that increasingly characterizes where we adults spend the day.
21st CENTURY SECURITY The proliferation of the internet of things will necessitate its equal and opposite
reaction, securing the systems that enable it. (Above: AUHSD Magnolia High School Center for Excellence
Cyber Security suite).
COMPUTING AND MAKING Students born into the information age will employ computing as the foundation for innovations in robotics, appliances, alternate energy and mobility production. (Above: AUHSD Magnolia High School Center for Excellence prototype development/presentation hall and computing classroom.)
But how much of this is the province of the architect? A well-equipped studio, lab, or workshop is a simple, messy place. Great, even good buildings are not required. A good conversation requires no building at all, not much more than the shade of a tree. We make do. Instead, isn’t our real contribution Athens? Who would Socrates, Plato and Aristotle have been without Athens (and vice-versa)? Is not the education of the whole person nurtured by the buildings and ensemble of buildings we inhabit — not the bus, but the campuses, towns and cities in which the bus circulates? Within the school buildings we design, our minimum obligation, to be sure, is to account for the classroom of the future — or is it the past? Regardless, it is the buildings and the accumulation of them for which we are most responsible.
SCHOOL STUDIO This room for a school in Los Angeles will accommodate activities associated with performing arts. It can be blacked out completely and opened up completely.
SCHOOL WORKSHOP A maker space is little more than what we use to call a workshop. The setting matters to the extent it facilitates what goes on in the room.