The Architecture of Educare

Environments built specifically for children are of marginal significance to most narratives of architectural history, with the notable exception of the school. The transition from the laboring child to the schooled child brought about by compulsory education, which according to T. H. Marshall initiated the welfare state as mode of government based on social rights of citizenship, entailed a massive, sustained building program, turning the design of schools into a major architectural endeavor. The challenge of developing a new type of institution to serve a “user” who is conceived as being different, and to represent the civilizing and democratic ethos of the modern state, provided the opportunity for the architectural profession to innovate and experiment in new modes of administering, designing and constructing buildings. Beginning with E. R. Robson’s School Buildings, published four years after the 1870 Education Act made education compulsory in England, the school provided an important institutional framework for modernizing architecture as a technical expertise based on research, standards and guidelines, anticipating later developments in architectural practice associated with modernism. Robson (1972:3) argued that school architecture should be based on the study of the activity taking place in it and the needs of its particular users, and criticized the prevailing architectural attitude in which “attention to external prettiness was regarded as the chief matter.” Yet he made the case that school architecture should not to be strictly utilitarian, because of the special nature of the child:

For children whose manners, morals, habits of order, cleanliness, and punctuality, temper, love of study and of the school, cannot fail to be in no inconsiderable degree affected by the attractive or repulsive situation, appearance, out-door convenience and in-door comfort, of the place where they are to spend a large part of their most impressionable period of their lives. (Robson 1972:6)

The school building was entrusted with the function of communicating to children and the public at large civic values and narratives through architectural codes drawn from historical precedents. With the rise of modernism in architecture and progressivism in education, school buildings came to “symbolize a hope for the future” by self-consciously differentiating their style from those of the past. The permanence signified by monumental brickwork that characterized municipal schools built during the last decades of the nineteenth century was replaced by a transparent style (Burke and Grosvenor 2008:68). With the modern movement individual school buildings enter the architectural canon for the first time, in part because they were designed by noted modernist architects such as Gropius, Duiker, Neutra, Terragni, Lods, Saarinen, and Meyer. It could be argued that the school provided a fertile ground for modern architecture because new forms of child-centered pedagogy and health standards for air and light allowed architects to implement many of the spatial and formal attributes associated with modernism, ¹ but also because modernism’s claim to represent progress fitted well with the perception of the school as a place where the citizen of the future was to be habituated into modernity. Alfred Roth’s influential The New School (1950), a trilingual publication sponsored by CIAM that consciously sought to exploit the opportunity offered by the widespread demand for new schools during reconstruction to promote modern architectural principles, is a key document for understanding why schools became the privileged building type for postwar architectural culture. Roth established a rhetorical equivalence between the New Education and the New Architecture, as both relied on the same metaphors of “open” and “free”, to mobilize the progressive and humanist appeal of education for the promotion of modern architecture:

There is a striking similarity in the development of modern architecture and modern pedagogy… Both started from an unprejudiced conception of man and accordingly placed higher importance on psychological factors. (Roth 1950:30)

In a manner typical of modernist rhetoric, Roth situated the modern in opposition to the allegedly flawed practices of the past, when schools were designed in “blind imitation of historical styles and uncreative architectural thought,” reflecting the nineteenth century’s lack of awareness of “public education as social obligation” (Roth 1950:8, 24). Following Sullivan’s functionalist dictum that the solution can only be found in the problem itself, he argued that the school layout should be “a true image of all functions and requirements.” He based school design upon the triad of psychology, science, and aesthetics, three aspects that this chapter will explore as they relate to children.