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A unique partnership between architecture, schools and Government has been developed in Hampshire County, UK. By establishing close links with the community and by valuing the quality of the built environment, public architecture has created learning environments which are functional and economic yet adaptable, enjoyable and enhancing the quality of life of the community. Such achievements do not come easily. They require vision, commitment and pursuit of excellence, often in the face of opposing forces. Strategies for providing a built environment which enhances the quality of life and meets the needs of people are addressed.
Glen Murcutt states in the introduction of 'Leaves of Iron' how excited he was by the Aboriginal saying, 'One must touch this earth lightly'. I respect that for it says so much about our mutual aspiration for an architecture that aims at the spontaneity and authenticity of the individual experience, but above all represents a social and environmental responsibility. It suggests an architecture that rejects efficiency (as an end in itself) and it rejects fashion but rejoices in the real things of everyday life. We yearn for a natural and radical architecture for ordinary buildings that lyrics in the elegance of 'modernist minimalism' because we also have to be economic, but have the memory of tradition craft and what they offer in well being. We need an architecture of empathy and humility.
That might sound all to pious but suffice to say Glen Murcutt's architecture has influenced us profoundly, and that we are truly part of a global village in the exchange of ideas. But will the Global Village only breed global village idiots?
I show Woodlea Primary School by contract - located in a beautiful Arcadian pine wood glade. Built in timber and designed informally almost casually around a small natural amphitheatre which leads down to a clearly which forms its playing field. This whole environment has an intimate, childlike, innocent quality to it, which provides a wonderful setting for the union of work and play. Play sculpture and small events enrich the context and education in this place for small children should properly invite stimulus and adventure. The whole intention of the project, however, seems to realise the saying, 'One must touch this earth lightly'.
Since 1973 and until 1993, I was full time County Architect of Hampshire. Now I am Design Professor at the School of Architecture, University of Portsmouth, retaining the title of County Architect as consultant, earning fees for the University on particular projects. This represents a three way partnership of large client, practice and school, with complementary benefits of research, practice teaching, CPD, recruiting, etc.
Hampshire, with a population of 1.5 million, is a historic and traditional county. It includes three historic cities - Portsmouth, Southampton and Winchester, two new towns - Basingstoke and Andover; it has a southern coastline and maritime history and beautiful downland country side with exceptional beach hangers, chalk and flint geology and exceptional heritage of which the Great Hall and the Cathedral in Winchester, and Portsmouth Dockyard are outstanding.
It was the subject of local government review in 1974 when its boundaries were reviewed. That experience was a watershed and end of chapter, not only for Hampshire, but for local government. In 1997 there is going to be a further review when one of three options will be chosen by the citizens of Hampshire to determine its fate. Hampshire is the largest administrative unit for education in England. In 1986 it had 870 schools, 100 of which were secondary; 17 colleges of further education; and one polytechnic which is now a university.
So for 14 years 1973-87, I headed a department that aspired to be a 'design centre', but increasingly was having to accept the realities and the priorities of the management of an existing estate. These responsibilities came into a sharper focus when under a corporate strategy the department assumed the responsibilities as the County's Agent for the Landlord for the whole estate in 1987.
Concurrent with these management changes were the challenges created by the culture shock of the Thatcher legacy. There as a concentration of power in central government with the promotion of the 'opt out' schools policy that was a concomitant to the 'Customer Charter'; inducements to schools to opt out meant that many education authorities became almost moribund; the country burgeons with customer, citizens', parent, children's rights, but individual responsibility are only just beginning to be articulated under a new and more promising social chapter.
Hampshire's education authority created a partnership arrangement with schools which contradicts government policy in the scale of its success. Schools see the benefits of such an arrangement and very few have opted out in Hampshire.
However, there is a definite change in attitude cause by the promotion of this spirit of competition. National league tables are published annually and, frankly, cause almost universal disaffection. One is left with the question which goes against the whole theme of this conference as school competes with school - 'Is education a shared experience?'.
My career in Hampshire represents a full turn of the wheel - it might be termed 'from systems to systems'. What I inherited as a responsibility in 1974 as County Architecture was 'modernism institutionalised'. The largest proportion of the estate had been built during the 50s and 60s to meet the post war building programs.
Most of these schools were achieved through a systems approach in the wake of enlightened Hertfordshire schools program - industrialised, mass produced components, kit of parts, modular, dry site assembly. There were bulk purchase serial contracts that included not only buildings and components but boundary fencing, service roads, playing fields, a sort of environmental game played by procedures and numbers in which the architect and designer had almost totally abrogated their responsibility.
Economy was paramount and achieved through repetition and standardisation. Consistency was seen as the great virtue because it is democratically manageable under egalitarian attitudes of fair shares for all. And so by the same token, quality destabilises in the resentment created by unevenness.
With the blinding wisdom of hindsight it all smacked, not only of cheap building and even cheaper environments, but also cheap politics - the consequences were obvious to see and amounted to an alienated public estate with which not even the users identified impoverished, not only physically, but spiritually. Expenditure on maintenance of these buildings is now a disproportionate part of the total spent on the estate and pre-empts new building.
I like the way Colin Roe expressed the evangelical role of the architect, as hero and saviour, after the 2nd World War -
The architect called upon himself simultaneously to assume the virtues of the scientist, the peasant and the child. The objectivity of the first, the naturalness of the second and the naively of the third indicated the values which the situation required and the architect transformed in terms of his image, could now assume his proper role - part Moses, part St George - as the leader and liberator of Mankind.The idea was grand and for a time the messianic program was productive. The architect found himself to be an enthusiast for speed and for sport; for youth, sunbathing and a simple life, sociology, Canadian grain elevators, Atlantic liners, Vuiton trucks, filing cabinets and factories. And his buildings became illustrations of these enthusiasms. But they also became the outward and visible signs of a better world as testament in the present as to what the future would hold. But the hoped for condition did not ensue. For when modern architecture became proliferated throughout the world, when it became cheaply available, standardised and basic as the architect had always wished it to be, necessarily there resulted a rapid devaluation in its ideal context. The intensity of its social vision became dissipated. The building become no longer a subversive proposition about a possible Utopian future. It became instead the acceptable decoration of a certain non Utopian present. The Ville radieuse - that city where life would become intelligent, educated and clean, in which social justice would be established and political issues resolved. The city was not to be built.
The scheme was now ripe for the cheap politician and the commercial operator. Modernism had been institutionalised. So today the architect is no longer hero, and in the absence of his influence and his subversion, the procedures prescription formula, remain the generators of a utilitarian, unfeeling architecture that is symbolic of the values of a culture that only knows about commodity, consumerism and the evolution of systems.
My experience seems to have been a reversal of the early heroic modernist principles. In Hampshire we celebrate the particular rather than the universal. I have unwittingly (by being County Architect of Hampshire) become the agent for Frampton's 'Critical Regionalism' going against the homogenising tendency of government policies, guidelines. bulletins.
Frampton quotes Ricoeur
The threat of universalisation is expressed among other disturbing effects by the spreading before our eyes of a mediocre civilisation which is the absurd counterpart to the elementary culture....mankind en masse is approaching a basic consumer culture has stopped en masse at a sub-cultural level.We have jettisoned other modernist dogmas such as the flat roof and the free plan and indulged expansive large volumes under pitched, sloping or profiled roofs but always being mindful to have a functional justification. Big volumes were justified to save energy.
We have exploited the challenge/opportunity of route and promenade (arcade) energy conservation through passive heat reservoir accessibility, security, landscape, special drainage measures to form water gardens and biology ponds. If there has been a hidden agent it is this aspiration for environments that stimulate and delight the spirit and these are part of educational experience.
EnergyThrough the profiles and comparisons of expenditure the schools have developed their own management expertise. We provide a space planning service which now has a national reputation in that it offers advice and guidance to other authorities. Its main task is to give advice and guidance to County secondary schools on matching accommodation necks against curriculum mix and pupil numbers. IT achieves this by utilisation studies and premises audits which take account of curricula changes and forward projection of pupil numbers. These occupational factors are the essential means of determining the form of any reorganisation.
Maintenance
Temporary buildings
Capital receipts
Rateable values
In 1987 the Department of Education and Science published circular 3/87 entitled, Providing for Quality: The Pattern of Organisation to Age 19. The circular argued that by reducing surplus accommodation created by falling rolls, the quality of education would be improved by releasing funds for other uses. In the period 1989 to 1991 there was in Hampshire 21,311 surplus school places. Managing this shrinking process calls for creative demolition, selecting the best and eliminating the environmental liabilities.
Few educational establishments achieve occupancy or utilisation ratings that justify high first cost investments, particularly when this is augmented by high fit out and equipment costs. And yet as an architect, I am constantly trying to persuade my clients to invest more in quality building. More prolonged use can be achieved by extensions of the academic year, a third semester, summer conferences or symposia. But summer occupancy of buildings will have design implications.
Curricula timetabling is fundamental and yet the disciplines and determinism that this requires contradicts the spirit of liberal and democratic freedom of academia and creates its own problems.
The tendency in new building is to create more generalised flexible space and to blur the edges between teaching and learning spaces. General space should be almost universally adaptable to specialist space. Laboratories, for instance, can now be provided through kit of part components which solve the problems of services, drainage, specialist furniture, but admittedly these proprietary systems are expensive. The preferred option is a design strategy to provide regimes of high services but seldom have we been able to afford flood wiring, universal raised floors, comparable with high quality office building.
During the 70s there were demands to make more of our educational spaces windowless with controlled environmental systems to accommodate the advent of communications and IT equipment. When these spaces were added to windowless theatre workshops, lecture spaces and sports halls, a high proportion of the school or college was blacked out. Those decisions were obviously retrograde. The post war adage of allowing the penetration of sunshine, light and air wherever possible as an antidote to "the 19th century institution", still obtains, qualified with more sensitive and effective controls. There is a consolidated intention now not only to conserve energy by the use of daylight but also to use passive heating and ventilation by exploiting solar gain.
Most of the educational culture of the 19th century until recently has been either unacknowledged or seen as anathema, repressive and institutional. However, the influence of the engineering elegance and ambition of Brunel and Paxton, which has been celebrated, has now been extended to embrace the accumulated and traditional wisdom of some of the ventilation systems of the 19th century, eg the spider at the British Museum, or the ducting systems of the Palmerston forts, or the 19th century theatre.
Air conditioning is self consciously avoided wherever possible and only in lecture spaces or intensive computer occupancy is to be used locally. The irresponsibility of the indiscriminate use of air conditioning using CFCs panders to our ever growing expectancy which so often provides to be a chimera.
In our own school of architecture we find it very difficult to provide sufficient work stations for every student. Studio teaching has always been regarded as fundamental to all the great schools of architecture (except perhaps the Architectural Association).
The reliance on a home base is now a working condition almost axiomatic, and although video, multimedia computer aids will certainly increase they will not entirely replace the traditional sources of knowledge, books, libraries.
So the built elements that provide the design opportunity tend to be the non teaching spaces, the social, catering, recreational and learning spaces. But then the strategic opportunity is probably not so much in the buildings, but in 'the in between' zones of courtyard, sanctuary, precinct, cloister, arcade, lobby, vestibule, forum.
With the increasing use of the home base, the incentives for personal attendance on course work are changing and will also have to be acknowledged in the design of our colleges. The teaching of hands on skills, the variety and diversity of what is on offer, interactive video, the growing need for continuing professional development, a more mature educational profile and a new social mix will create a change in the nature of educational environment that will be relevant.
Collegiability and a closer identity with local community will test the notion of boundary and accessibility, security, vandalism and what constitutes a welcoming educational environment. The spaces between buildings cannot be neutral, indifferent, impoverished but will assume an importance to lyricise events, activities, occasions.
| Please cite as: Stansfield-Smith, C. (1994). The built technology of the learning environment. In J. Steele and J. G. Hedberg (eds), Learning Environment Technology: Selected papers from LETA 94, 326-329. Canberra: AJET Publications. http://www.aset.org.au/confs/edtech94/rw/stansfield-smith.html |