When I was growing up in Gainesville, it was a much smaller place. A little college town often described as “sleepy,” bounded by Waldo Road on one side and the University of Florida on the other. Even then, in the 1970s, the town was split into two halves—a white half on the west, and an African-American half on the east.
For some reason, I grew up on the east side, and went to schools with a large African-American student body. The middle school I attended, Lincoln, had once been a segregated black high school in the first half of the twentieth century, and many of the teachers and administrative staff were black, as was a good chunk of the community that surrounded (and supported) the school.
This might come as a surprise to people on both ends of the political spectrum, but I have nothing but good memories of Lincoln Middle (nor of Williams Elementary, for that matter, which is roughly one-hundred yards north of Lincoln). It was grand old school, full of bright kids and tough teachers who had dedicated their lives to teaching. But there was another reason I liked Lincoln.
It was the building.
More specifically, it was the architecture, and the grounds on which the building was set. Lincoln, like so many old schools in that time, did not have air conditioning. As a result, there were lots of windows, almost floor-to-ceiling, which could be opened in the spring. They also afforded an excellent view of the neat, working-class neighborhoods that surrounded the school, as well as the ball fields, which still had a large number of oak trees.
I was so happy at Lincoln, in fact, that when I finally graduated and attended a large, suburban high school on the opposite side of town, the shock could not have been more terrible. The high school I ended up at (which I won’t name) was a modern concrete building, with few windows and hallways that felt subterranean, as if you were constantly entering or exiting an airport parking garage. The were no windows except for a few, obligatory glass slits in the front, and many of the classrooms I spent my day in were lit solely by fluorescent light.
I don’t mean to talk ill of my high school. It was a good school, with very good teachers, and it gave me a good education. But the building itself, and the atmosphere it created, could not have been more depressing. The school felt, quite literally, like a prison.
© Copyright John A Sellers and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, lately, mainly because my son just started high school this month. He was home-schooled for most of his life, and now that he had decided he wanted to go to a regular school, I was adamant that he would not attend a place like my alma matter. Luckily, we were zoned for Gainesville High, the much older, urban high school deeper in town. As far as I can tell from the outside, GHS is a much more open, airy, traditional kind of school, with lots of sunny spaces and windows and trees.
Fortunately, my son seems to like it.
But the matter started me wondering: why are most American schools so frigging horrible? I don’t mean academically—we’ve all been bombarded with op-ed pieces describing how dismal our educational system is (a thesis I don’t believe and never have). Rather, I mean that American schools are horrible in their physical character, in their appearance and aesthetics.
I searched Google Images for the terms “high school buildings” and got an endless list of dreary results, mostly variations on one of several themes: the cinderblock prison, the red-brick barn, the steel military base, the concrete warehouse.
I hate to say it, but our schools look like crap. The great novelist Alison Lurie says it best in her non-fiction book, The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, in which she writes:
[Modern high schools] might have a classical front entrance, with fake pillars and a pediment, but their sides and back were often unrelieved expanses of brick and stock windows. Once you were around the corner, the place felt like some kind of factory.
Indeed.
This strikes me as very strange state of affairs. I mean, I’ve been to France and I’ve seen the schools there, and, yes, they are very nice and pretty (like everything else in France). And I know that American schools are built out of utilitarian necessity, by cities and counties with ever-shrinking budgets. And I also know that rich people have all the money in our country, and their kids go to private schools.
Ibagli – Wikicommons
I know all that.
But even if you accept the fact that the average American schoolboard will never have as much money to spend as those in Europe (a heartbreaking fact, but there it is), I still believe that you can build a nice, attractive, pleasant school that kids will actually enjoy going, and that you can do it almost as cheaply as you can build a cinderblock monstrosity.
A little bit of good government would be helpful here. Speaking of France (again), I was told once that there are laws in France that regulate how much wall-space of a public school must be windowed. I couldn’t find any hard evidence of such laws, but I did stumbled upon this 1881 entry from Chicago’s Education Weekly…
Whether [school] rooms are lighted from one side or from several sides, by a single window or many, the dimensions of these openings must always be calculated so that they will admit light to all the desks. The mullions separating the windows must be as narrow as possible. The windows must be divided into two parts. The lower part, the height of which must be equal to three-fifths of the whole height, must be a casement window, and the upper part transom lights, opening upward.
Not that’s how you build a school.
Maybe the real reason I’ve embarked on this rant is simply my love for Allison Lurie’s book. She is a great writer and, like all true artists, she has made it her mission to help us see the world around us with new eyes. She reminds us that the very houses and schools and office buildings we spend our lives have a constant, direct influence on our happiness, our emotions, our joy.
I’m also reminded of another quote, this time by Paul Goldberger:
I know that architecture matters very much to me, but I have no desire to claim that it can save the world. Great architecture is not bread on the table, and it is not justice in the courtroom. It affects the quality of life, yes, and often with an astonishing degree of power. But it does not heal the sick, teach the ignorant, or in and of itself sustain life.
He’s right, of course, on both points. Architecture can’t heal us, but bad architecture sure as heck can make us sick. And that’s doubly true of young people.
I really wish that some fine person—someone a lot better than me—would write a set of Federal guidelines for the architecture of schools. Even better, someone should make a website that would let people view and rate school building plans before they go into construction. Hell, the mob might not make the best decisions, but it sure as hell can tell you when you’ve made a crappy one.
I guess my point is: why can’t more of our schools look like this…???
2020 LIVERPOOL – Wikicommons
The answer, of course, is money—at least in part. But an even bigger part is will. Planners have to know they can do better. And we, as citizens, need to force them to.
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