Student Entrance (same school)
The mechanical HVAC units, chain link fence, and token windows of the media center dominate the aesthetics of the student entrance show here. While every side of the building should be beautiful, the student entrance should be the most inviting. The media center shown here between two classroom wings has no outside reading area and very little natural light or ventilation.
Extension of Right Wing (above)
This typical classroom wing houses one grade level. Age segregation and subject segregation are two of the holdovers from our ongoing experiment in graded schools. Students attending school houses such as this have approximately a 50% failure rate in high schools in some districts. This design remains dominate in much of the educational culture because decision makers do not know about the influence that the school environment has on learning.
Long halls of identical classrooms with minimal natural light, marginal storage, and limited room to move around are shown here. It is so common as to be epidemic, and any alternative is considered heretical, impossible, or toxic. Yet we are proposing an alternative. Imagine a wooded site with a campus of small buildings 2000-10,000 square feet each. These building are connected with plazas, terraces, walks and gardens, all parking and traffic is off to the side. We could have this for the same price as the buildings show here.