HELLERUP SCHOOL IN GENTOFTE, DENMARK [Arkitema, 2002] This open-plan school has many informal learning areas, with sofas and pods branching out from the central staircase. The central staircase is the main feature of this school and it has been replicated many times in other educational buildings around the world since. It is the heart of the building, the main meeting place and the first space one encounters upon entering the school.
Transformational ideas In England the last school building programme on a similar scale as Building Schools for the Future was half a century ago the in 1960s. In England in 1975 an international survey was published exploring schools built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, whose buildings were thought to be representative of advanced pedagogical thinking. It described ‘Operational flexibility, shared community, access to facilities and the exploitation of new technologies and materials’ as being the discourse of the time and ‘emphasised a break with the past and projected the vision of a new dynamic relationship between school community and wider society.’2 Rethinking pedagogical ideas and the spaces needed for new forms of teaching through new technologies and materials is very much a ‘mantra’ for today as is putting the school back at the heart of the community. Transformational ideas in primary schools were perhaps, more radical in the past. In post-war England for example the experimentation by the architect and educationalist partnership of David and Mary Medd3 in the 1950s resulted in the ‘expanding classroom’ and ‘design
from inside out’. This led to a child-centred and gentler approach to the use of space. Some primary schools were also exploring new approaches to teaching the curriculum in line with the now famous Italian educational experiment in Reggio Emilia where the actual fabric of the school is thought of conceptually as the third teacher. In secondary schools where teaching is subject-specific with students moving to a classroom or discipline-specific space, a different approach is needed and perhaps it is more challenging to break from the norm, but there is surely still room to make the spaces specific to their subject in some way. The biggest change in the spatial configuration of schools has been exemplified in the past decade in Hellerup School in Gentofte, Denmark [Arkitema, 2002] in a largely post-industrial suburb of Copenhagen in Denmark. Designed for 640 6–16 year olds, Hellerup School is particularly famous for its centrally placed wide staircase in an atrium space that forms the main meeting place for the school.4 The new configuration of space encouraged new ways of teaching and learning, treating the students as more mature and independent learners. Open-plan teaching areas with spaces with sofas and
1 FROM IDEAS FOR LEARNING TO ARCHITECTURAL FORM 26