Precious spaces in schools, how can we make them work for everyone?

The aim of this post is to consider the value of small rooms in schools with the intention of starting … More

Education in the time of Covid-19: who gets to decide and when? A call for increased participation in the design and adaptation of education and schools

This is a guest post by Dr Tom Bellfield, a part 2 architectural assistant at SCABAL, an architecture practice specialising … More

Mythologies of learning spaces in the time of Covid-19

The closure of many schools around the world in the past few months has given us a unique opportunity to … More

Spot the Difference!

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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…

Interview with Herman Hertzberger (2016)

Herman Hertzberger, born in Amsterdam in 1932, is one of the world’s pre-eminent architects. He founded Architectuurstudio HH in 1960 … 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.

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

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.

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.