Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to attend the CAE Fall 2016 Conference at EdSpaces in Cincinnati. I was impressed by the breadth of topics addressed in the classroom sessions; the curators were able to present content that appealed to the wide variety of professionals in attendance, bridging various disciplines and viewpoints to appeal to our common interest in education. During the classroom sessions, I had the chance to speak and even collaborate with educators, school administrators, school operations specialists, sales representatives, as well as other architects. This was a rare occasion to share my impressions with professionals working in different areas of school design in real time as we experienced the classroom sessions together. These conversations helped remind me of a key aspect of our job as architects and designers: to help marry the varied expectations and concerns of the many different parties involved at all levels of the academic process.
The language I heard used by educators and designers was vibrant with enthusiasm for the evolution of school designs toward more flexible, creative spaces for the next generation learner. Meanwhile, in my conversations with those embedded in the day-to-day challenges of school maintenance and operations, I heard some concern about moving too quickly toward spaces that they perceived could be inappropriate in a decade’s time.
I walked away from the conference with a renewed sense of how important it is for architects working in school design to understand and bring together the perspectives and needs of the many parties involved in facilities projects. For a project to be successful, the architect must effectively translate the goals and desires we hear from teaching staff (in charrettes and collaborative design sessions, for instance) into ideas and solutions that operations staff can not only manage but also embrace. The architect’s role includes accommodating the full range of users of the facilities we design, so that together we are creating spaces that can evolve to serve the many unknown needs of future, technology-savvy learners.
One of the areas of content that I connected with most at the conference was the focus on early childhood education spaces. The keynote lectures and a number of the classroom sessions addressed this subject. As the conference was taking place, the Cincinnati Public School District was in the process of campaigning for Issue 44, a tax levy with a particular emphasis on providing preschool education opportunities to the City’s three- and four-year-old children (it has since passed). A number of talks were rooted in a common funding discrepancy: while 90% of childhood brain development occurs before age five, the majority of academic funding is focused on programs for children six years and older. The combination of policy discussions, quantitative data, and architectural applications presented in the conference sessions provided an impressively comprehensive picture of how the Cincinnati metropolitan area is working together to address this shortfall they have identified in their academic programs. I appreciated the storyline that was created to depict how the problem was identified, how politicians began to address the issue, and how some architects have already begun to embrace this newfound push and are working with educators and families to improve existing facilities while brainstorming ways to apply the funding that will soon be available.
Our firm, DOWA-IBI Group, also had the exciting chance to design one of the classroom spaces at this year’s conference. Being able not just to design but then also to construct and experience the built design—and observe how the space performed—has led to some great conversations among our staff over the last few weeks. The elements of the space were flexible enough to accommodate large group sessions as well as smaller, casual, and in-between-session activities. We also found success with one of the tools we had prepared for the classroom space: large-scale posters that presented narratives and diagrams from a variety of our real life clients explaining how they might adapt and use our prototype “(un)classroom” layout in different academic settings. People were able to experience being in the actual (un)classroom space while at the same time getting a glimpse of how that space could transform depending on students’ and teachers’ activities. The displays were well received by attendees from different professional backgrounds, who were able to find merit in the same features though often for different reasons.
We have been brainstorming as a firm how we can build on the success of these graphics during our design process to further link the requests we hear from educators and those we hear from operations staff. Being able to enable a range of users to understand a potential space can help us create even more satisfactory spaces that meet the long-term maintenance goals of our Districts while allowing continued flexibility as classroom needs and technology continue to evolve and students become ever more adept at embracing the possibilities available to them.