AR Reading List 054: seven schools

The school is a reflection of the values a society imagines for its future. It can be a centre of control, a machine to press young minds into models of an ideal citizenry, in which to establish in each new generation an understanding of authority and power. It can also be a space to set children up with the tools to question pre-conceived norms and construct new, as-yet unimagined realities. Design cannot work alone in the distinction, but it makes a critical difference. This reading list brings you seven schools from the archive, produced across multiple contexts and with lessons to learn from each.

Sandal Magna Community Primary School in Wakefield, UK by Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, AR February 2012, Gillian Horn
‘Almost overnight the school-building bubble burst, with aspirations cut even deeper than the funding of the transformational new schools programme. And so it is that already, after only a year of standing, the Sandal Magna Community Primary School feels redolent of another, bygone era’

Avasara Academy in Pune, India by Case Design, AR February 2019, Smita Dalvi
‘Avasara (meaning ‘opportunity’) Academy is a “home-grown exemplar” of how to address the disparity between women and men in the Indian workforce – a school, whose pedagogy is customised to offer high-end education to girls’

St Angela’s College in Cork, Ireland by O’Donnell + Tuomey, AR June 2016, Shane O’Toole
‘Publicly funded Irish schools are tightly prescribed, with standardised classroom layouts and strict controls over floor area. Yet St Angela’s, although it complies with the usual rules, feels totally different – liberating and uplifting – because it was conceived as a village’

Fass School in Senegal by Toshiko Mori Architect, AR April 2020, Chérif Tall
‘The Fass School almost sprouts from the rough terrain of the Kaolack region as a terraformed body. As the sun ascends into the morning skies, life slowly emerges. The darkness fades away only to timidly hide in the corners’

School in Tama, Tokyo, Japan by Kengo Kuma and Associates, AR April 2013, Yuki Sumner
‘The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 killed roughly 100,000 people through the fire that spread via the timber terraced houses, destroying a good part of Tokyo. The government subsequently issued a decree that all public buildings, including schools, be built in reinforced concrete’

School at Hunstanton, Norfolk, UK by Alison and Peter Smithson, AR August 1954, Philip Johnson
‘But it is here a radicalism, which owes nothing to precedent, and everything to the inner mechanisms of the Modern Movement. It does not merely imply a special kind of plan or structure, but a peculiar ruthlessness – overriding gentlemen’s agreements and routine solutions – which pervades the whole design from original conception to finished details’

Media attention overload: the collapse of Makoko’s floating school, AR online June 2016, Tomà Berlanda
‘The Floating School is a paradigmatic example of projects viewed from a distance, both in Lagos, since most of its daily viewers only looked at it from the Third Mainland Bridge commuting to and from Lagos Island, and abroad, where thousands of consumers of social media were captured by what Dan Hancox has rightly called in these columns “fetishisation of poverty architecture”’