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As if learning in the classroom weren’t challenging enough, school renovations can disrupt teachers who are trying to teach and kids who are trying to learn. Too often during a renovation project, students are displaced into shaky mobile-home-style classrooms and/or packed into gyms and music rooms.
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Recent Oregon graduate Kris Celtnieks has an answer for these problems. His full-size pre-fabricated temporary school building would be a middle ground between stable, permanent space and the shanty feel of mobile classrooms. His buildings would be quickly assembled on vacant spaces near schools under renovation, providing learning-friendly space with good acoustics, pleasant lighting, and a solid framework. They could be quickly configured to the site and sized for enrollment. When renovations are complete, they could be disassembled and infinitely reused. As conceived, they feature a fabric roof, adjustable microclimate, and a self-contained waste-processing system.
“While it’s wonderful to recondition historic schools, the side effect is displacing children – and teachers – into inadequate learning environments,” says Celtnieks, a son of two teachers, who just earned his master’s degree in architecture from the University of Oregon. “My goal is to make the transition period, which can be a matter of years, a positive experience for students and faculty.”
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Celtnieks calls this vision, the subject of his master’s thesis, the “Relief School of Philadelphia.” And it’s the winner of GRAPHISOFT’s Architects Jury 2010 competition.
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