ABSTRACT
What constitutes the ideal learning environment? This question preoccupied many school designers for the first half of the twentieth century. One of these designers, the American architect Ernest J. Kump Jr (1911-99), made the search for an optimised classroom space an integral component of his long career of designing elementary and secondary schools in the US state of California. From the mid-1930s until the early 1960s, despite postwar shifts in educational pedagogies that had radical implications for how the classroom as a learning environment was conceived, Kump’s ‘finger plan’ schools came to define the typical image of the postwar Californian school. Further, they also represented the sometimes uneasy meeting of an environmental idealism in relation to the individual classroom with the hard-nosed rationalism of efficient, economic construction techniques and the contingencies of a largescale, expandable school campus.
