The editorial, below, was written on June 17, 2006 in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Chris Satullo, Editor of the Inquirer's Opinion section, chronicles the yearlong connections between the architectural design process and curriculum, citizenship development, students, and teachers at a high school in Philadelphia.
Editorial | It's Not Just a Gym
Kids win when we let them be part of the team
Lankenau High School in the Andorra section of Philadelphia is getting a new gym.
The $11 million addition is a very small part of the city school district's $1.7 billion construction makeover.
But it could make a big difference in the future of some Lankenau students, because educators and the project architect took the time to make them a big part of the design team.
"I wanted to involve the whole school community in the project," said architect David Schrader. So he began work last September by involving students in a five-day version of the hands-on brainstorming sessions that architects call a charrette.
The students were asked to help come up with options on where the addition should go, how it should look and how related renovations to the existing school should be handled. To give meaningful input, they had to learn about design, engineering, site planning, "green" buildings and landscaping.
The school itself is a squat thing, but it sits in a lovely wooded hollow off Spring Lane in northwest Philly. The design team wanted to come up with a way to fit the 12,000-square-foot addition snugly to the building, without losing any of the trees on the hilly site. It was a tight fit, but they did it.
During the year, Nancy Bellew's math class and Michael Hardisky's science class took the lessons way further, under the guidance of Schrader's firm and architecture students from Philadelphia University. The 20-plus Lankenau students built handsome scale models of the building and of the entire site out of foam and butter board. They did a thorough environmental survey of the land on which their school sits.
The students presented their work to their teachers, parents and members of the community last week, with enthusiasm, style and the inevitable hip-hop soundtrack.
Afterward, Jacqueline Bentley, the principal, said, "I actually have tears in my eyes. It just shows that when you give these kids a seed of something purposeful, they can take it to full bloom."
When a parent asked whether the experience had any of these students, mostly seniors and freshmen, considering a career in design or engineering, a thicket of hands shots up.
In this effort, Schrader, working with educational consultant John Sole of Guerilla Educators, demonstrated how design professionals ought to work with schools to improve the spaces where kids are asked to learn. (Schrader and Sole are doing a similar project-based learning effort with the Carver High School of Science and Engineering.)
Too often, schools are designed with only adults - and their preocuppations about cost, security and utility - in mind. They get built with little sense of how kids and their teachers actually relate to the spaces in which they are put.
As it turns out, Schrader and the school lived out a number of the core principles of school design that were sketched out last fall in the National Summit on School Design, sponsored by the American Architectural Foundation and KnowledgeWorks Foundation.
The gym isn't started yet, but the project is already a success.
Recent Comments