Plastic School

So changeable are U.S. communities that new schools can become obsolete tomorrow. Needed: buildings as portable as tepees, as stretchable as the mind. Last week the nearest thing to this ideal was announced by M.I.T.'s department of architecture--a plastic prefab school that can be erected on its foundation in a week, dismantled and reassembled elsewhere in about two.

The secret: a series of steel-and-plastic "tree units," which look like beach umbrellas with canopies curving upward instead of down. Bolted together, they form ceilings and roof; supporting pipe columns carry the load. By simply adding or subtracting tree units, the school can be expanded as the community's needs change --or moved to a new site.

So far the school exists only in model form in the office of Architecture Professor Marvin E. Goody, who heads an M.I.T. team working on the project under a grant from Monsanto Chemical Co. Goody cannot yet predict how much a full-scale model would cost. But it could be planned in one-third the time needed for designing conventional schools, and built twice as fast.

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