ABSTRACT
In 1966, Karl Otto (1966) observed that schools ‘are not only institutions for instruction, but at the same time visible symbols of educational conceptions of their time’. This becomes graphically manifest if we look now at the design of the UK schools that finally brought mass education to the population: E.R. Robson’s Victorian take on Queen Anne architecture. Such buildings are evidently not designed in isolation: they are the more or less finely tuned response, as we saw in Chapter 2, to global trends and forces, national policies and local funding decisions, and the personal beliefs of a headteacher or staff of a school. Designers of physical learning environments must ‘look to societal expectations and emerging learning theories to determine the possible use of school facilities in the future. Designing with those trends in mind will help create facilities that accommodate change more easily’ (Akinsanmi 2008: 4).
