Schools as living, Empowering Places

Schools should be places that empower their occupants to learn and live, by means of the kind of teaching offered and through the design of the buildings themselves. They should be places with a very special charisma, making a positive impact on enjoying learning and life itself.

There are places in buildings and towns that are especially captivating, impressive or stimulating. Unfortunately, such places are not usually to be found among the products of so-called modern architecture. Looking at any architecture magazine on the subject of building schools will horrify any real educationalist. A Swedish proverb says that the children are the first teacher, the teachers the second, and the school building the third. In other words, the school is the very place that should be designed to have those powerful qualities.

Human beings cannot survive in hostile environments without clothes and a house, so they have had to learn to house themselves. They have so internalized this that even as small children they instinctively start to build a protective envelope for themselves.

People need houses, and at the same time are capable of building houses. Housing ourselves is one of our primal needs and primal abilities, with the emphasis on “ourselves.” Involvement in the building process is crucially important for later acceptance of the house and identification with its four walls.

We have experienced this in building many family homes, and especially designing schools and other buildings for young people, where future users took part in the plan­ ning and building process. Physical involvement in building is not just a technical, but a social process. For millennia, building was a community process, neighborhood help and an initiation ritual, and was tied into a society and its traditional practices.

Our architectural practice, plus+ Bauplanung, has built eight youth clubs, which came into being largely through self-help. The result, as Peter Blundell Jones describes so vividly and expertly in his book about our work Building as a social process (2006), was that the buildings are treated lovingly and looked after well, and have remained largely free of any signs of vandalism.

We thought at first that the reason for this was that the young people directly in­ volved in the building process felt protective towards their own product. But this theory became less and less credible from year to year, as the buildings became older but still remained intact, while the original young builders had dispersed to the four corners of the earth. But still, subsequent young users insist that they had built their accommodation, even though they were not even born at the time of construction. So it seems that it is not only the builders who protect their building, but that it is the building itself which proclaims the unique way in which it was made, the story of how it came into being, and the immense effort invested in it. It seems as though the building is telling the story of the love and devotion that brought it into being.

Houses that are loved have an identity and individuality of their own, which lifts them out of anonymous uniformity. This becomes entirely comprehensible when we compare it with clothing. In both cases, it is only individual quality that leads to real identification and affection. Clothes and houses have to meet emotional and social needs as well as performing their function. If houses are not to be merely protective huts, but also create a space in which individuals and the group can live, they have to perform a range of complex tasks. A house cannot be a purely technical and cognitive construct, but must meet a wide range of emotional and social needs.

The buildings for young people were realized on a self-help basis in the period from 1983 to 1992. Later on, our projects became larger and more complex. This meant that realization by the individuals in the construction process inevitably decreased, but par­ ticipation in the planning process remained, especially in the case of schools. This ap­ proach is described in step by step detail in our book Kinder bauen  ihre Schule/Children make  their school.  Evangelische Gesamtschule Gelsenkirchen (2005).

We learned that involving users in planning, taking people’s requests seriously and discussing the various possible solutions thoroughly is an extremely laborious and time­ consuming process, but always a productive and successful one. It seems to be more important than self-help at the building stage and leads to the same feeling of a self- determined, tailor-made design solution, and also to a high level of identification with the building. It seems as though the particular ambience, the uniqueness or even something like the aura of the building is captured in what is actually a dead object, through the per­ sonal involvement and devotion of many people (preferably the future users). Then, the building is able to proclaim: “1 am a real individual, a living organism and I am all this especially for you, who recognize me. I am an essential part of your entire personality!

People are inclined to personalize the things that surround them, and language re­ veals this: “That poor old house,” “that fragile chair, “that beloved vase.” In his 1998 book The  hand,  Robert T. Wilson vividly explains the connection between grasping with the hand and grasping with the mind. He shows that in terms of developmental history, the hand was there before the brain. Because early humans were able to oppose thumb and index finger, their hands developed into astonishingly sophisticated “tools.” This extraordinary dexterity of early man made it essential to develop communication and hence a larger brain. Making things and developing complex manual skills is still one of the essential building blocks of good education. Hand, heart, and mind should be developed to an equal extent at the same time.

Children grasp (again this word with two meanings) and comprehend the world in their immediate vicinity with all their sensual organs, the mouth, the skin, the nose, the ear, and the eye. This is crucially important for our observations of what could make schools into living, empowering places: Only environments that stimulate and flatter all senses, keep them awake, are fit for human beings. Little children are already familiar with the nature of many subjects and objects. They can identify them by taste, smell, sound, and structure, not just by their appearance, and can remember positive and nega­ tive experiences. They have learned to distinguish between hot and cold, loud and quiet, hard and soft, sweet and sour, smooth and rough, sharp and blunt, and so on. They have learned to distinguish between things that please and things that hurt, between good and bad things, as it were.

The parallels with the way we perceive architecture are obvious. Buildings and towns are also taken in by all our senses. In order to design spaces that bring pleasure to the senses, they have to be thought and invented into being using all the senses, not just with the eye and for the eye. This is not advanced very much by architecture peri­ odicals with their carefully composed photographs of spic-and-span buildings without any people and furniture in them. At worst, they are setting trends and serving  as models for the next generation of architecture students with examples that fail to meet people’s actual wishes and basic needs.

People are able to spontaneously feel positively or negatively affected, touched or accepted by objects, materials, structure etc. A schoolgirl does not have to touch a bare concrete wall to realize that she doesn’t like it. Her experience tells her: cold, rough, dusty, and thus not pleasing to the hands, not a home-like place. And she wants to do nothing but get away. A child does not have to walk down that straight long corridor to know that it is boring, predictable, not an adventure. There is no escaping it either, so better just don’t set off down it. And a teacher doesn’t have to try teaching in a tra­ ditional boxy classroom to know that it is like being in a barracks, nothing like home, certainly not a living space. And that it offers no help in teaching. Most of our senses respond negatively, and not with sympathy. Schools for the future, the children who will learn in them, and the teachers who teach there, they all deserve better.

Peter  Hübner

(Translation by Michael Robinson)