Building ideas

Is an institution a building? The advantage of a building is that it makes physically manifest a set of ideas. Its presence is the product of decisions. The decisions are shaped by the desire to enable a set of ideas to become the norm. Seen in this context, the most important aspect of any building is the brief. The most important part of the brief is not the technical specification. It is the honed down expression of desire.

How do you make manifest an idea? Take the idea of learning. The school as a building, and the school as institution are often overlapped. They are seen as the same thing. How the building is organised is seen as key to how learning is delivered. Better learning in this context is about better school building. But what if we were to look at the idea of learning differently? What if we were to look at how the connections between people along their life journey, and the transitions between phases of learning could be enabled in multiple ways?  What would the spatial expression of this be? What is the role of place?

I was part of a workshop recently that looked at these issues. The context was a campus with a college, a university, some health facilities, the possibility of new housing and a strategic need to look at learning at a variety of scales. The conversation was initiated by a head teacher who spoke about the learning outcomes being promoted by Curriculum for Excellence: qualities of active learning, lifelong learning, active citizenship and confident contributors.

The teacher spoke passionately about the need for connections between people, between the learner and the community to achieve these outcomes. He spoke passionately about the need for better transitions between all phases of learning and between learning and work, learning and life. He was speaking about people. His query was about what size of school you needed to make these ideas manifest.

The workshop unfolded. The discussion ended up looking at how to make more use of existing buildings, how new insertions into the built environment could be shared across different learner types. The college could use the same science labs at the university, as the primary school, the secondary school, as incubation units for transition to work. These spaces could enable connections between different learning communities, between different communities, connected communities. The transitions between learning could be more fluid, thicker, more informed. The funny thing was that to make this happen you have to move away from the idea of a school as a single building, a single idea, a single institution. You need to see all space in a place as a shared resource, a shared realm. ‘The commonweal’ is a Scottish expression of collective effort for the common good. These ideas around learning allow the potential to make manifest a modern expression of the ‘commonweal’.

Thinking this way, the outcome would be not just a new way of learning, not just a better way of using public resources, but people whose future is actively making lifelong learning, citizenship and confidence in contributing to society and its debates. Identity in this context is less about a shiny building, and more about owning and cultivating a culture in a place. Imagine that the public sector desired this future. Imagine they delivered it. That’s what is going to happen in this place. I felt inspired.