Schools of Tomorrow

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us-

--Winston Churchill

Since World War II, the boom in U.S. school construction has been so phenomenal that it currently accounts for 20% of all public building. The value of U.S. school buildings has reached about $30 billion--nearly four times the total assets of General Motors. More than half the nation's youngsters will soon be in postwar buildings; yet need still outstrips supply. This month schools across the land are re opening with a shortage of 132,000 classrooms. The need for the next ten years: 607,000 new classrooms at a cost of $25.5 billion. And ten years after that? By then the school-age population may be more than double the present.

What kind of classrooms are needed?

Until recently the U.S. conception of a school had changed little since the nation's first fully-graded public school--Boston's Quincy School--opened in 1847. Quincy made one radical concession to individuality: desks in seven sizes for growing scholars. Otherwise, all students passed their years together in box-shaped rooms, class by class, the bright and dull handicapping each other. This week Quincy School reopens its ancient doors, admitting 291 more students, still a monument to "egg-crate" education. For a century such schools have changed only the style of their facades--from Victorian Gothic to WPA Colonial to Neo-Revival.

Sun & Air. But the modern U.S. schoolhouse has a vastly bigger job. All under one bulging school system, Americans now demand kindergartens, big-time football, classroom TV and junior colleges. They want summer sessions for the gifted, special teachers for the retarded, night classes for the aged. The air-conditioned hive that serves this honey must house carpentry shops and physics laboratories, a hall for the town meeting, and perhaps a swimming pool that adults can use too. It must impress like a monument--and be as cheap as a summer cottage. It is running out of space, money and teachers.

The few architects who care to tackle such specifications have sprouted some of the most eye-catching buildings in the nation (see color pages). Architect Richard J. Neutra's pioneering (1940) Crow Island Elementary School in Winnetka, 111. did away with fixed seats and high ceilings. Architect Mario J. Ciampi's prizewinning Westmoor High School (1958) in Daly City near San Francisco is big, stunning architecture: shimmering glass, enamel murals, barrel-vaulted roof. Grabbing whatever space is left to schools, other designs march ingeniously up and down hillsides. New hexagonal and pentagonal structures reach out for sun and air, proclaiming the pleasures of education.

Time to Think. Yet in the past few years, a certain reaction has set in. When critics cried "frills" at murals and mosaics ("Must schools be palaces?" wrote Dorothy Thompson in 1957). school boards began to listen. New designs often emphasize the penny-pinching Spartanism that pioneering architects borrowed from industrial buildings. And many a school board's haggling habit of comparing prices per square foot (U.S. median: $15.99) drives away architects. Some boards would just as soon skip hiring an architect in favor of prefabrication.

Except for small and poor schools, or for stock parts in big schools, prefabrication is no final answer. For each school is a unique problem in tailoring costly space on differing sites and to different needs. ("Frfls" are often the cheapest item.) Today, the key word is "flexibility."' To keep pace with fast, shifts in population, schools must expand or contract. Portable classrooms (3,300 in Los Angeles) are one answer; wings that can later be dismantled or sold to business are another. But most important, tne flexible school is a hedge against educational oosolescence. Even the fancy new schools have not basically changed the egg-crate system; the real revolution in U.S. school architecture is just beginning.

Spurred by the teacher shortage, educators are mulling revolutionary curriculums geared at last to individual differences. Proposals were laid out last year by Education Professor J. Lloyd Trump of the University of Illinois, head of a team financed by the Ford Foundation. The future high school, said the Trump report, will dispense with standard classes of 30 students meeting five days a week on inflexible schedules. For 40% of the time, large groups of 100 students or more will attend lectures and demon strations. Another 20% will be spent in small seminars of about a dozen students.

For the remaining 40% of his time, each student will be on his own--experimenting, reading, memorizing--and, hopefully, thinking about the task in hand.

Factory or School? Run by "master" career teachers (earning $15,000 a year, Trump proposes) and assistants, this sort of schedule requires a different kind of school planning. Though acoustics are a problem (no really soundproof movable partition has been perfected), flexible walls can help turn the trick. One arresting example is Architect John Lyon Reid's new (1958) Mills High School in Millbrae, Calif. Though built to stand 100 years, Mills follows an industrial "loft plan" in which none of the interior walls is structural. By adjusting a few nuts and bolts, walls can be shifted overnight.

But despite the California climate, Reid's $4,032,596 "factory" school (capacity: 2,000) has almost no windows; light comes through prismatic glass blocks in the ceilings. It is hermetically sealed and mechanically ventilated, so stripped down for action that pipes hang exposed. Flexible as it may be, say critics, it is a mighty cold-seeming place. Is this an invitation to learning?

In sharp contrast is the new Wayland (Mass.) High School, a remarkable $2,360,000 layout (capacity: 850), due to open this month 16 miles from Boston. Designed by Walter Gropius's Architects Collaborative, Wayland is a modified "campus plan" of six separate buildings, organized according to subjects (arts, language, math and sciences, etc.). Each center has varying-sized rooms with movable walls--a big lecture hall, small seminar rooms, a "resource area" for individual projects. Equipment is lavish; the arts center has a theater and a TV studio.

Wayland's most striking architectural feature is a field house with a geodesic dome to replace the traditional gym. Though it includes a basketball court (taken apart at season's end), the field house is not limited by the court's dimensions. The domed design yields 41,000 sq. ft. of enclosed space, including an indoor dirt track, exercise rooms, and seats for the Wayland Town Meeting.

Giant Half Step. Geared to college-bound students, Wayland has a Trumplike curriculum. The typical student will spend 10% of his time in seminars, 80% in the conventional classroom, 10% in large lecture-discussions. With team teaching and an adviser for every 20 students, each student will be encouraged to go as far as he can in each field. A bright youngster may pick up broad principles in group discussions, carry them further in seminars, use the "resource areas" to dig in on his own, and wind up with advanced standing in college.

Wayland is still only "a giant half step into the future," says President Harold Gores of the Ford Foundation's Educational Facilities Laboratories. By no means is it expensive ($12.40 per sq. ft.) nor so frugally designed as to be inhuman. In fact, the architects have a high ambition for it: that to the students it will be "a school which will compete with the corner drugstore."

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