On the design of school spaces and their uses…
Interviews and posts that take a historical perspective on school buildings, education and design
Some notes about a book of interviews with Italian architect and anarchist thinker Giancarlo De Carlo.
The following are notes on themes (principally space and education) I found interesting in Giancarlo de Carlo and Franco Bunčuga’s Conversazioni su Architettura e Libertà (2014, 2nd edition) [Conversations about Architecture and Liberty]. Continue reading “An Anarchic Take on Architecture, Space and Education – Giancarlo De Carlo and Franco Bunčuga’s Conversazioni su Architettura e Libertà”
After 1968, James Ackerman, Giancarlo De Carlo and others questioned school design: why? why like this? This post revisits their questions.
“In the Middle Ages, colleges like those at Oxford looked like monasteries because the Establishment was theocratic; today [1969], our high schools look like factories and regiment students like the labor force because the Establishment is commercial and industrial.” (James S. Ackerman)
Ackerman is generalising and knows it. He wants to skip past instances of particular schools in particular places and think about why they tend to look as they do: it’s a question that’s often ignored.
But ignoring why facilitates an automaticity about school design that works to obscure who they are designed for and what purposes. [1] Schools, Ackerman says, are not built for students but for Continue reading “What High Schools Look Like and Why”
A list – to be updated – of school museums (that is, museums of school life or buildings) in Europe and a few beyond.
Below is a list of museums related to school and school life. I’m happy to add to it or make corrections if you have suggestions – just use the Comments form, below. Thanks. Continue reading “A List of Museums of School, School Life and Education”
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.
The old primary school in the village of Nerokourou, just outside of Chania, Crete, was open to students between 1930 and 2000. When the new and much larger primary opened, 100 metres up the hill, Headteacher Dimitris Kartsakis and his wife Maria Drakaki wanted to keep the original school as an educational tool in its own right. With teaching materials, school bags and tunics from the 1940s and 50s, curricula, registers with students’ marks, maps, restored desks and seating, clippers for cutting the hair of children with lice, the Museum of School Life opened in 2006. Continue reading “The Museum of School Life, Nerokourou, Crete”
Estelle Morris, Baroness Morris of Yardley, former British secretary of state for Education and Skills (2001-2) taught PE and Humanities from the mid-1970s until 1992, when she was elected as Member of Parliament for Birmingham Yardley. In 2005 she joined the House of Lords as a Labour peer.
What are your early memories of school?
In primary school I can recall the pebbledash walls, the open corridor Continue reading “Interview with Estelle Morris, Baroness Morris of Yardley”
