The Post-Secondary Model

Last week i had the opportunity to speak with representatives from a number of architectural firms displaying their works (in the interest of recruiting students, naturally). One of these firms specialized in grade schools around Michigan, which, at first, strongly piqued my interest.

Grade schools, more so than many other clients, have an extremely prescriptive idea of what the school should include, but they also vary wildly in shape. There need to be X number teaching rooms, of which Y need to be science classrooms with sinks and natural gas, which, in the case of an emergency, need to be removed by Z distance from the other classrooms. If the school has a developed music and/or theatre program, those rooms need to be removed from other classes sufficiently to not disturb them or each other. Each teaching room must accommodate at least A number of students, and be flexible enough in use to facilitate subjects B, C, or D. There must be E amount of circulation space around lockers, of which there must be F amount. More recently, there must be sufficient exits for an emergency, but only G entrances, of which all must be observable by the administrative faculty. I could go on, but i think i've made my point.

So i thought a relevant question would be to ask about the ideology of the firm, as far as layouts go. They tempered the answer by stating that the schools themselves vary greatly as far as how "progressive" or "conservative" they want their new building to be, and money, as always, limits how much innovation they can make in any one school. Essentially, they told me nothing at all. I persisted in my questioning, and finally i got to the gory details.

In one example which i was shown, they detailed how the general ideology had been to keep the students in one classroom throughout the day while teachers moved from classroom to classroom (following the post-secondary model, he said). This, he claimed, helped the students develop a sense of community with each other. In addition to staying in the one room for essentially all day, the students would keep the same classroom from year to year, often with similar teachers. "Instead of having a 'sixth grade science teacher'," and i paraphrase, "you would have general science teachers who would teach science to the same cohort of students for many years." This, he again argued, would allow for the teachers to develop a stronger relationship with the students.

I was horrified.

At this point i gave up my previous, spineless courtesy (which i had adopted in the interest of getting the firms to reveal as much as possible to me) in favor of actually standing up for an issue. Why was i so horrified?

"I feel like being stuck in one room all day would be terribly claustrophobic." I said. "Children and teenagers have well documented needs for exercise. Learning in such a stagnant environment can't be good." That was it, i blew any chance of an internship there. But i had just begun to speak to the representative a few minutes before, and these sorts of introductory chats generally lasted about a quarter of an hour. He must have felt a compulsion to continue the conversation for the prescribed amount of time to save face instead of brusquely dismissing me. Or maybe he didn't realize that i was criticizing his style. I don't know.

No, he countered, repeating himself, this would forge community in the students. I went on; the post-secondary model (the collegiate model) operates on a fundamentally different level beyond the form of the school.

First, where do the teachers keep their educational and personal materials? In education there is what's called the "teachable moment," a narrow window during which the instructor can, if they handle it properly, eloquently teach some specific point to great effect. The architect to whom i was speaking informed me that the teachers can carry their materials from room to room on carts. Carts, huh? I've seen teachers forced to use carts. They HATE them.
And that doesn't even address the issue, it just shunts it to the side. Most teachers have more 'stuff' than can be carried in a cart. They'd need personal offices (and not just for their stuff, but so the students would be able to find their teachers during non-class times). Honestly though, how many public schools have the kind of money necessary to give all their teachers private offices? If they did, they wouldn't be adopting this more "cost-efficient" (the rep's words, not mine) model.

Secondly, why should we aim to emulate a model in which the vast majority of the teachers are not actually trained in educational pedagogy? They may be experts in their field (and you can't even make that argument for graduate student instructors, or T.A.'s as they are sometimes called, as they have no field experience, only theoretical knowledge), but that doesn't mean they have any idea how to teach. Classes often take the style of the lecture, which is not an effective teaching model for younger, more easily distracted students.

I told my mother this story the next day (she's a language teacher), and she added an excellent point. A huge amount of the learning in schools is social learning. Figuring out what is socially acceptable, and finding your place in the complex social network is crucial to developing maturity, and more importantly, a sense of self. Additionally, having a larger group of students with which to interact is the epitome of the diversity argument. There's only so much diversity present in a single class, but an entire school's worth of students can have much, much more.

I don't really think i got through to him. His answer is the easy one -- it's sufficiently different from the norm to suggest that he's edgy and progressive, but mainstream enough that it's easily accepted without his having to legitimately validate it to clients. What the alternative, though? There's certainly a problem with the physical forms of our schools, else teachers would be clamoring for restoration projects instead of completely new buildings (which is the case occasionally, but only when bond issues fail and money becomes a problematic limiting factor).

I don't know. I don't know if anyone does. But the answer is not inconsequential.

Context (One)

There are a fabulous number of buzzwords in the architectural realm. There's a bizarre need for ideas to be "organic", "generative" or, my personal favorite (not really), "dynamic". Most of the time these are thrown around so flippantly that they've lost any real semblance of meaning. Even when they are used with a particular meaning in mind, the overuse of the words has caused a cornucopia of understandings. Essentially, people are talking about different things all while using the same words.

What's most amazing is that no one really seems to notice this. They'll have a conversation with a colleague, superior, or student without realizing that the other has absolutely no clue what is being said. This is fun to watch, if you can hold both meanings of the word in your head at the same time, like an Abbott and Costello skit.

Incidentally, the ability to understand contradictory situations at once has been held up as one of the ways in which Humans separate themselves from the Lesser Animals. Of course, before that was metacognition(disproved through rats, of all animals), and before that was self recognition (disproved through elephants,, dolphins, and others), and so forth. I digress, but that's ok, because that's the sort of thing that i'm interested in anyway.

So if you can hold those two ideas in your mind at once, you'll notice that the conversationalists are not even truly responding to one another but rather homing in on a single word (usually the misunderstood one) and saying anything that they know about that particular word-concept. While this continues the talking, it doesn't really push the conversation anywhere. I would say this kind of speech doesn't serve any useful purpose, but i suppose it helps to elicit an image of a polite, informed individual to the other person. After all, if you're lucky they'll assume you're really smart and know much more about the topic than they do.

What i really wanted this post to be about, though, was context, which is, admittedly, one of those kinds of words.

Context is often shunted to the side of an architectural project, or at best considered to be on par with issues like form and function. But i argue that while words like environment, culture, and other local factors relate to particulars (that is, they exclude certain qualities), the locus of topics within context is infinite (plainly said, nothing is not part of context). You might rightly say that developments in the fishing industry has no cultural impact on Tibetan farming villages. What you're doing is putting fishing in the context of the farming village. It's inescapable.

So when so-called experts make claims like 'this building does a good job of contextually relating to its surroundings, but fails programmatically because the local vernacular style is ill suited to the construction style of a hospital/school/absurdly dangerous chemicals plant', they're ignoring the idea that the local vernacular style being ill suited to the construction style of whatever IS the contextual relationship to its surroundings.

On a side note, a teacher of mine way back in high school informed me that her husband owned some kind of small factory (i want to say it made fire extinguishers, but that's almost too ironic) which produced a large amount of shredded scrap magnesium. As you may or may not know, magnesium, in the presence of friction, ignites. Explosively. With a white-hot searing flame of permanent annihilation. Ok, i made up the last part of that, but i think it actually is white flame. That's not important in the context of this article, i was talking about um, something.

The thing those "experts" are overlooking is at the crux of my argument. If the building failed to take into consideration the program, then it did not "do a good job of contextually relating to its surroundings."

When you look at context, you have to look at everything. And that's key -- in all facets of life.

Genesis is a good place to start

I was thinking about what to call this blog just a moment ago, so i consulted the internet for help. Foolish. Names are important, i get that. In fact, that was one of the first things i wanted to write about in this blog (but not yet). What then, do i come across as i'm searching for beautiful words that people will use when TELLING THEIR FRIENDS about this blog? A post from the xkcd forums (which, i might add, is an excellent webcomic).

Allow me to regurgitate the words of AKADriver on Tue Dec 04, 2007, whom i have never met.

I've got a few hypotheses.

In a low-context culture like that shared by English-speaking Westerners, it's considered a requirement to be polysyllabic to succinctly convey any sort of richness of meaning. The longer a word is, the more nuanced its meaning becomes.

Historically, in English, longer words of Latin and Greek origin were considered more prestigious among literati. A lot of modern English vocabulary, including all those fussy SAT words, was built in the 16th and 17th century because of this trend.

A word that's used infrequently lends itself to aesthetic study, because you're less apt to examine it based on its meaning.

For fun, try rephrasing that second sentence with only the vocabulary of Simple English.

Just to play devil's advocate, words with strong beauty associations can sound beautiful too, even if they're short -- like love, or rose.

I couldn't help but shake my head in frustration and groan upon seeing that. It is the archetypal argument of sign/signifier/signified which i have heard so many times in my Design Fundamentals classes. But like i said, that's not what i wanted to talk about in this first blog.

I wanted to set forth a list of a few topics for later discourse. I encourage any and all readers to suggest more.

(The Big Ones)
Context
Sustainability
Homogeneity
Materials

(A Few Recurring Topics)
Architects as People
Students as Architects
Pedagogy (Resistance)
The Vernacular and the Monumental
The Future of Architecture vs. The Reality of Architecture

(Context)
Architecture as related to other professions, such as
-Psychology
-Philosophy
-Science & Math
-Music
-Art
-Education
-Health
-Recreation
-Commerce

And within all this i hope to make a blog that you enjoy reading, because that's the point of putting my opinions out into the public realm, right?