Education: The Latest Architecture and News

This article was originally published on Metropolis Magazine.

Green building was always part of the firm's DNA, though a little more than ten years ago Lake|Flato formed an internal studio that would focus on landscape and resource management.

For over three decades, San Antonio’s Lake|Flato Architects have advanced the cause of critical regionalism in South Texas. Founding partners David Lake and Ted Flato met in the office of O’Neil Ford, an early Texas Modernist whose work combined structural innovation with local building traditions. When they started their own practice in 1984, Lake and Flato carried this germ with them, turning out a series of ranch houses that garnered attention for their deft blending of modern modes of living, indigenous materials, and agro-industrial vernacular.

Architecture firm NUDES has released details of their proposed secondary school in Malawi, constructed from straw bales. Responding to a brief focused on modularity, incremental expansion, deployment, and sustainable technology, the scheme is formed of a modular “ladder” component deployed to create a structural system that houses the pedagogical intent of the school.

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Perkins+Will has released details of their design for the Ransom Everglades School in Miami, Florida. The school’s new STEM building will feature flexible classrooms with mobile walls and furniture, and an emphasis on indoor/outdoor connectivity. The school’s role as a nationally-renowned center for science and technology will also be aided by tech-enabled educational tools, fabrication and maker labs, a rooftop outdoor lab, and an entire roof of solar PVs.

David Chipperfield Architects Milan has won an international competition for the design of a new campus for the University of Padua. Developed in collaboration with engineering company Steam, the competition challenged firms to design a new “PiaveFutura” campus of Social and Economic Sciences. Among the practices selected for the restricted procedure competition were Bak Gordon, Barozzi Veiga, Cruz y Ortiz Arquitectos, Foster + Partners, and Sauerbruch Hutton.

This article was originally published on CommonEdge as "How Design Education Can Transform Our Schools".

Volume Zero has announced the results of their RE School architecture competition 2018, which challenged participants to design and innovative school that brings education to children living in the most inaccessible areas of the world. Serving as a hub for interaction between local communities, the winning schemes ranged from a school floating above a shanty area to a transportable building made of hands-on material.

Below, we have republished the three winners from the competition. For more information about the competition, honorable and special mentions, visit the official website here.

C.F. Møller Architects and EFFEKT has won an architectural competition for the design of the new SIMAC (Svendborg International Maritime Academy) in Svendborg, Denmark. Set to be completed in 2022, the open, flexible, modern learning institution seeks to educate the leaders of Denmark’s future innovative maritime industries. In addition to their role as design team for the academy, C.F. Møller Architects and EFFEKT have also prepared a masterplan for a surrounding district including housing, commerce, and urban green space.

The 12,500-square-meter SIMAC will contain common areas such as a Campus Square, teaching areas including auditoriums, laboratories, and simulator centers, and rooms for administration and support. The SIMAC will also sit within an overall development plan for the area, dubbed the “Harbour of the Future,” also designed by EFFEKT.

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Herzog & de Meuron has released details of their proposed Forum UZH, creating a new center for education and research on the city campus of the University of Zurich. The new building is a seen as a crucial element for ensuring the future viability of Zurich as a higher education hub, upgrading and consolidating an existing aging, dispersed campus.

Due to be completed in 2027, the Forum UZH will occupy a prominent corner site, combining expansive public space with the firm’s recognizable clean, contemporary language. Situated in the old city’s university quarter, dominated by stand-alone buildings set back from the street on below-ground plinths and terraces, the Forum UZH forms the 21st-century embodiment of the stately urban campus.

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Videos

This November, RIBA launched a national school program devoted to providing children between the ages of 4-18 access to architecture programs. This will be the UK’s first nationwide architecture program. The instructors, formally known as Architecture Ambassadors, are volunteer architecture professionals donating their time to partnering schools at which students participate free of charge.

Before launching the nationwide program, RIBA conducted a pilot version - gaging interest and success from students, school administrators, and ambassadors. The pilot phase visited over 200 schools in England and 18,000 students. Each school’s architectural workshop was highly individualized to the community and location, adding a personal aspect to the student’s introduction to the vast field of architecture. These tangible projects investigated local areas, assessing their needs, issues that affect the community, and their hopes for the future.

Design, in all forms, is a fundamental part of our daily lives; it's even at the core of the new economy. As a result, design education is such an important topic for discussion that design curator and educator Jan Boelen puts at the center of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial.

As the curator of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, together with associate curators Vera Sacchetti and Nathine Botha, Boelen questions the role of education in design today -- just as the Bauhaus celebrates 100 years.

In a rapidly changing world with an uncertain future we cannot anticipate what will happen in the next few years, nor even the skills that we will need. Instead, we need to develop "learning as an attitude" to constantly deal with change, as Jan discusses in our video interview.

To address these issues the curators laynched an open call with 753 submissions, from which 120 were chosen to be part of "A Schools of Schools". In this strong response Boelen found projects that "are an answer and maybe already a forecast of a new kind of design where speculation, criticality and relational aspects are infusing the traditional design world, that is making solutions for the issues that we have today."

The 120 participations are organized around six schools which occupy six cultural venues in central Istanbul, encouraging visitors to explore the city while visiting the Biennial. Here are the schools and our picks:

Office Ou, a Toronto-based landscape design firm, in collaboration with INOSTUDIO Architects, has designed a new public school for the historic Smíchov district of Prague. The initial competition, organized by the Centre for Central European Architecture, chose the Office Ou & INOSTUDIO design out of 66 anonymous submissions. This school would be the first new public school built in Prague's urban center in close to 100 years.

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Within the architecture field, the relationship between design and education has gained prominence, especially when it comes to children’s education. The relationship between architecture, philosophy, and sociology is well known. Frequently, when designing, issues introduced by these fields work as tools to reflect upon the relationship between the space and the user. When we consider children’s education, we must go beyond ergonomics and think of architecture as an educational tool.

Le Corbusier stated in his seminal text, Towards a New Architecture, that “...man looks at the creation of architecture with his eyes, which are 5 feet 6 inches from the ground.” Logical and rational codes such as this form the standard for much of architectural production - but of course, these "norms" are as constructed as architecture itself. This particular standard is especially irrelevant when designing for children, for whom the adult-centric assumptions of architecture do not and should not apply.

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The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has issued a statement outlining its new initiatives in response to the rising tide of school shootings in the United States. The statement, titled “Where we stand: School design and student safety,” outlines four paths of action the Institute intends to take to support architects and school communities.

While not containing a detailed policy to tackle the ongoing crisis, the AIA statement commits to updating school design guidelines, supporting education to achieve safe school design, making safe school design eligible for federal grants, and establishing a federal clearinghouse on school design.