Schools and the Language of Design

Architecture for Education

By Christian Long

Blueprints Spring 2007
Volume XXV, No.2

Christian Long is president and CEO of DesignShare, an Internet-based clearinghouse for information about school design and planning. His career includes extensive teaching experience in various communities, including stints in Japan and on the Navajo reservation. He developed and directed an architecture, design, and planning program for urban high school students in Washington, D.C., where he also served as a volunteer educator for the National Building Museum’s Design Apprenticeship Program, an outreach program in which teenage participants design and build full-scale building elements. 

In addition to his role at DesignShare, Long serves as a senior educational planner with Fielding Nair International, a school planning consulting firm. He speaks nationally and internationally on topics ranging from emerging trends in education to innovative school planning practices.

As a school planner and school design researcher, I often spend time thinking about the power of language. School design requires a tremendous amount of expertise and collaboration to make dreams reality. Educators and design professionals tend to use different language to describe their imagination. At the same time, the most innovative projects seem to rise above individual expertise. Most successful school projects grow out of a shared language co-owned by all stakeholders throughout the design process. The power of shared language was something I learned first-hand as an adult volunteer in the National Building Museum’s 2004 Design Apprenticeship Program (known informally as the DAP Squad). And it is a reoccurring truth I see shaping successful projects day in and day out as I work with different communities around the world.

Looking back on our first day together, the 2004 DAP Squad students and volunteers with whom I worked were not initially focused on how design could build a community. We were prepared to explain, draw, cut, mold, and build, but we were not prepared to listen or collaborate. This was not an issue of age—it was an equal challenge for student and adult alike. While we were all ripe with passion and imagination, we had difficulty explaining our best ideas to our project teams. Likewise, we had a hard time “hearing” each other’s ideas in return. Ironically, what we discovered was that language kept our teams from finding common ground at first. The beauty of the DAP Squad’s curriculum, however, lies in fostering a shared “language” of design that allows each person’s independent vision to contribute to a unified whole.

As professionals, educators, and communities seek to design dynamic and learning-centric schools for the 21st century, it becomes evermore critical that the design process bring collaborators together quickly. While it would be impossible to give everyone—teachers, parents, school board members, voters, children, etc.—a career’s worth of architectural expertise overnight, we can empower all groups by using design language that is intuitively logical for all involved. For that purpose, my colleagues and I often refer to design “patterns” as a starting point for design discussions that empower all stakeholders. As architect Christopher Alexander taught us in A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings and Construction (Oxford University Press, 1977), design patterns—timeless ways of building—focus on recurring “problems” that we all encounter. Furthermore, Alexander’s patterns provide the heart of a solution that can be used over and over again, but in customized ways. As you can imagine, this is extremely beneficial as we shape the campuses that will support learning well into the future.

Prakash Nair, REFP and Randall Fielding, AIA, two school planners who have designed award-winning schools for communities around the world, sensed that Alexander’s pattern language offered a common means of communication that could serve the future of school design. Combining intuitive sketches and the everyday language of educational facility concepts, Nair/Fielding’s work resulted in the publication of The Language of School Design: Design Patterns for the 21st Century (DesignShare.com, 2005), the goal of which was to empower all participants in this vital community design work.

As Nair/Fielding wrote, “Despite the fact that the educational establishment itself has embraced a number of innovative approaches over the years, architects often hear educators speak with a vocabulary reminiscent of their own childhood experiences in school buildings designed for a different time.” In a day and age where technology and global access to ideas is profoundly transforming the very premise of what we mean by a “school,” it is more vital than ever that design teams use vocabulary that embraces the future of education rather than relying on what the traditional factory-model schoolhouse of the past demanded.

To that end, The Language of School Design has created nearly 30 innovative design patterns, or diagrammatic “big ideas,” combining 21st-century educational language with intuitive architectural graphics. Patterns include such elements as “welcoming entries,” “transparency,” “student display spaces,” “daylighting,” “school as 3-D textbook,” and “campfire and watering hole spaces,” to name but a few. Each offers a starting point for design teams to express their visions. Likewise, together they offer an interconnected commitment to the design of innovative schools and campuses that serve our learners’ future rather than our schools’ past.

Taking it a step further, communities, educators, and architects have now begun to combine the language of design patterns to create unique learning studio spaces that foster entire learning communities. As reported in “Master Classroom” (Edutopia, George Lucas Educational Foundation, 5/15/06), Nair/Fielding’s use of design language has led to the creation of innovative studio models, each named after “an illustrious thinker [who] shaped [his] time,” such as da Vinci, Einstein, or Jamie Oliver, a chef and entrepreneur who is also a de facto educator, using food preparation as a vehicle for teaching younger generations about realizing their potential, making intelligent choices, and alternative paths to success. Each reaches far beyond the traditional classroom model by inspiring new school designs where all learning styles are embraced in shared spaces.  Additionally, an interconnected combination of learning studios and collaboratively-used design patterns allows communities to create technology-rich and authentic project-based schools anywhere in the world. 

Recently, I had the good fortune of spending a weekend in Oregon’s Gladstone School District at their high school with staff, community members, business and institutional leaders.  Also in attendance were representatives of four other school districts who asked to attend as observers and were inspired by what Gladstone was beginning to develop. The participants were brave enough to ask great questions about where educational programming and school design are headed. Along with their design partners (John Weekes and his team at the architecture firm DOWA), the school leaders, teachers, and members of multiple communities are facing significant school construction projects. Instead of rushing to re-create outmoded prototypes, they chose to bypass the traditional process and take a serious look at the trends that are shaping education and society. I joined Larry Rosenstock, the founder and CEO of High Tech High in San Diego, a school that has received countless design and learning awards, and Chris Lehmann, the founding principal of Philadelphia’s innovative Science Leadership School, which is described by many as the first example of “School 2.0,” to speak about global learning trends, the rise of collaborative technologies, and innovative school design practices. What could have easily been just a session focused on the “look” of school campuses turned instead into a dynamic conversation that sparked several communities to re-think their assumptions about school design. Ultimately, what began to unfold was the creation of a shared language used by all community members and their design partners based on forward-thinking learning philosophies. 

Just as I found in Gladstone, communities around the world are beginning to discover the link between a shared design language and the ability to create truly innovative, forward-looking learning environments. Instead of remaining divided by expertise and being told the answers by architects, the Gladstone School District and their design partner are choosing to develop a common language that fuels shared design goals.  No longer is it acceptable to rely on the school buildings or campuses of the past to guide our design and construction decisions of tomorrow. How is this taking shape today? It is happening in Oregon and it is happening in all corners of the globe. It can be seen in learning studios based on an overlap of learning styles that break from the traditional factory-model classrooms, allowing learners of all ages to become collaborators and agents of change. As Christopher Alexander taught us through the use of design patterns and Nair/Fielding expanded upon for campuses, we possess the means to co-create language that will allow us to quickly form unified partnerships in the design process. This is also the promise of the National Building Museum’s DAP Squad each semester, as young students and adult mentors come together in search of innovative design solutions. As the program reminds us all, “design challenges” allow designers of all ages to “design and construct full-scale projects that they control from concept to completion.” This has more to do with group process than individual talent. 

What is true for the Museum’s educational outreach programs is also true for school design teams, and for that matter, for anyone involved in real-world architecture projects: By developing and accepting a common language of design, we can all contribute more effectively to the improvement of our shared environment.

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