Architects of corporate offices and school classrooms have a shared dilemma: How to design a space that allows for focused work and group activity. In the search for answers to fix the tyranny of open-plan offices, researching the history of elementary classrooms yields a surprising catalog of ideas.
In the new book “The Design of Childhood, architecture critic Alexandra Lange presents a fascinating survey of classroom design. From 19th c. one-room schoolhouses; the L-shaped layout in the progressive Crow Island School in Illinois; no-grid desk arrangements at the experimental Lincoln School at Columbia University Teachers College or the movable partitions and “breeze windows” of the innovative Rosenwald schools for African American children, Lange outlines how classrooms has evolved in response to changing politics, pedagogy and technology of the day.
Working closely with educators, school architects have obsessed for decades over creating optimized spaces, fiddling with furniture, ventilation, lighting, acoustics, ergonomics and sanitation. Architects have also found a way to foster a sense of belonging among students and teachers without plastering the walls with logos and specifying corporate-color themed interiors, as companies often do. They did this by choosing kid-sized furniture that made students feel at home in school, soothed by the “domesticity of materials,” as Lange puts it.
Each classroom design evolution presented solutions to improve the student experience. As workplace interior design expert Lindsay Wilson points out in a 2017 Quartz article, the education industry as a whole, are pioneers in design experimentation. Designers were mindful of the student’s physical measurements, (they made sure kids could reach things), postures, learning styles and schedule of activities. It’s a lesson that architects—particularly those who design offices—could take to heart, Lange argues.
“I think architects of open offices don’t pay enough attention to the choreography of the day,” Lange observes. “It is important to drill down on what people are actually spending time doing, and what will make them most comfortable doing it. Everyone wearing headphones is a sign that the architecture is insufficient, and can create social problems in an office,” she points out.