Incoherences in English Planning for Schools Policy

The English planning system promotes school choice not better or more sustainable or simply more schools. This post explores the consequences.

Space and Education Seminars, Spring 2020, London

Info on a new, free and open-to-the-public, evening seminar series, “Space and Education” at UCL Institute of Education.

City Schools as Meeting Places

Text of a talk I gave at the Université de Montréal connecting architectural ideas of the “in-between” to educational discussions on “meeting places”.

A Useful Definition of Architecture

What is architecture? A helpful definition by Giancarlo De Carlo clarifies what architecture is and who’s involved.

Spot the Difference!

Similar visions of school design travel the world at speed – with what effects?

Barbarian Education, state-evading learning and James Scott’s “Against the Grain”

Some thoughts about education and James C. Scott’s ‘Against the Grain’.

Giancarlo De Carlo: How to Keep Educational Architecture Human or Creative Anti-Institutionalism

A talk I gave at the Bartlett’s Spatial Engagement Network meeting about Anarchism, Education and Space on the architect Giancarlo De Carlo.

Disappearing School Libraries – Why?

School libraries seem to be disappearing – I suggest this is related to their being “illegible” in terms of how space in schools is valued.

“You can’t sit there”: How students claim and police school space through sitting

A guest post by Dr Siobhan Dytham on the rules and rituals that students develop about space and sitting in school

In the Hills, on the Trail of a Radical Priest and Critical Pedagogy

Moving north from Florence you climb up and up, past Fiesole to a ridge formed by Mounts Calavana and Giovi … More

Putting Children (and Values?) into Architectural Plans of Schools

Aldo van Eyck put children into his architectural drawings to influence ideas of schools. Can you add “values” too in this way?

How to make a basic school design pedagogically interesting? Learning from a case in Ecuador.

A guest post by Beatrice Balfour and Alejandra Manena Vilanova telling their story of co-designing a school near Cuenca, Ecuador.

Interview with Jeremy Till on Schools, Contingency, Flexibility and Competitions

Interview with the architect, educator and writer Jeremy Till on a range of issues involving architecture and school design.

Why Carillion and PFI Matter for Building and Designing Schools

How we fund and procure new schools matters. This post draws together some reasons why in the light of Carillion.

3 Cambridge Seminars, 2018: Educational Aims and Values through Architecture

3 Seminars at the Faculty of Education, Cambridge University exploring the role of the built environment in education and schools.

Schools of Tomorrow but Rooted in Society – an Interview with Silvia Fehrmann of Berlin’s HKW

An interview with Silvia Fehrmann, curator of HKW’s conference “Schools of Tomorrow” on schools and society.

Architecture Schools for Children

A list of organisations running architecture schools for children.

The Purposes and Functions of Schooling: some reasons governments give for building schools

Why do governments say they build schools? It’s not as simple as providing “education”.

Interview with Herman Hertzberger (2017): architecture as visual and social connection

An Interview with Herman Hertzberger from May 2017 about Architecture’s Role in Providing Visual and Social Connections

Measuring and Evaluating as Rhetorical Management

Are evaluation and measuring a form of rhetorics? A political art of obscuring the political? What’s Post-Occupancy Evaluation got to do with it?

An Anarchic Take on Architecture, Space and Education – Giancarlo De Carlo and Franco Bunčuga’s Conversazioni su Architettura e Libertà

Some notes about a book of interviews with Italian architect and anarchist thinker Giancarlo De Carlo.

What High Schools Look Like and Why

After 1968, James Ackerman, Giancarlo De Carlo and others questioned school design: why? why like this? This post revisits their questions.

What Are We Building Schools For Again?

For OECD and UNICEF, the well-being of UK young people is not good. Is it time to rethink the aim of school architecture?

On Forgetting: Some Similarities between Architecture and Social Media

Architecture and social media share a way of being understood as neutral things – their social production being obscured.

An Interview with Jill Blackmore on space, learning, feminism and the politics of education

Professor Jill Blackmore discusses learning spaces, teachers’ work, feminism and the complexity of education.

Pearson, IBM Watson and cognitive enhancement technologies in education

Originally posted on code acts in education:
Ben Williamson Image: Atomic Taco The world’s largest edu-business, Pearson, partnered with one of the world’s…

A List of Museums of School, School Life and Education

A list – to be updated – of school museums (that is, museums of school life or buildings) in Europe and a few beyond.

The Museum of School Life, Nerokourou, Crete

The old village primary school (1930-2000) in Nerokourou (Crete) is now the Museum of School Life (Μουσείο Σχολικής Ζωής) and striking for its reminders of the physicality of education and material technologies of teaching and learning.

Flexibility, Time and Learning Spaces

If teachers don’t have time to make flexibility happen, a learning environment isn’t flexible. This post proposes a breakdown into 4 types of flexibility based on the temporal (& other) resources users need.

The Changing Vocabulary of Education and its Spaces

A post exploring changes in the words used to talk about education e.g. the shift from “classroom” to “learning space”.

An Ideal School-Building Programme

Thinking about some of the differences between school-building programmes in Australia, England and Italy got me wondering – what would … More

Shopping for Schools 2 – Schools Advertising

Catch a bus or a train and you’re now likely to see advertisements for state-funded schools. That’s odd.

Italy’s ‘Competition of Ideas’ for a New School-Building Programme

Italy’s “Competition of Ideas” for Innovative Schools could stimulate architectural & educational debate.

Post-Occupancy Evaluation and Schools – an interview with Adrian Leaman

Adrian Leaman on what makes school buildings special, PoE and managing complexity.

When School Architecture Meant System Architecture

In 1811, Joseph Lancaster publishes his Hints and Directions for Building, Fitting Up, and Arranging School Rooms, one of the … More

Do Buildings: a) dictate b) choreograph… …e) suggest what you do…

You’re in a building. (And if you’re not, just pretend your app/software or whatever is a building anyway, it kind … More

Schools and School Design in Africa: An Interview with Ola Uduku

Ola Uduku (Edinburgh University) speaks about the historical influence of Western pedagogies and architectural traditions and their local adaptation in school design.

Does a School Building need to look like a School?

…is a question posed by the architect of the school where I’m doing my research. It came up in an … More

Architecture as a Social Science?

Some ideas for seeing architecture as – amongst other things – a social science. Also a bit on why the social sciences seem to ignore architecture.

Shopping for Schools – Should Architects Help?

This worries me: As schools behave more like private businesses they will be in competition with one another to attract … More

Measuring the Impact of School Design – Differently

To move beyond traditional measures of research impact, this post on the LSE Impact blog proposes a range of alternative … More

Summer Reading – “Seeing Like a State” and the survival of high modernism in school planning

For a book that says almost nothing about Education – no classrooms, no students or teachers, no school architecture – … More

AR’s School Awards: will the interiors count? That’s where students spend their 13,585 school hours…

As the Architectural Review’s School Awards close, let’s hope the judges give due emphasis to the design of the interiors … More

Can Economics explain why we don’t know what schools users think of their schools?

Recently I’ve been learning about Post-Occupancy Evaluation, mostly from the tons of great resources at the Usable Buildings Trust. It’s … More

Are you in the right home, near the right school? Are you sure?

A video popped up on Facebook: Almost 2 years into a PhD studying a school and I’m less and less … More

Interview with Suzi Hall, urban ethnographer and architect

Suzanne (Suzi) Hall is an ethnographer at the LSE, London, where she explores people’s lives in urban spaces. Prior to … More

Making Spaces, Forgetting Politics

Walls* are breaks (Vesely, 2013). They break into established categories of meaning and space and make new ones. They do … More

“Zigzag, white, no life”: a Martian’s View of Architecture

Our interactions with Google search results appear to contribute to the fetishization of Architecture as big white ribbed structures. This post explores why.

Open Space Good, Closed Space Bad? Problems with Architecture and Language

In which Marie, a 12-year-old student, explains how large, open-plan spaces feel claustrophobic.

What are schools for? An interview with Gert Biesta on the learnification of school buildings and education.

Gert Biesta on school architecture and democracy, and learnification – a reductive reappraisal of education as learning.