AS&U: One area that is of paramount importance to education institutions is security. How do you see this new environment and demand for improved security impacting the way schools will be used, designed, planned and function in the future?

Hendricks: I would like to see the whole discussion about safety and security in schools start with the culture and the size of our schools. If we simply start from the standpoint of lines of supervision and physical barriers and security devices, then we are influencing culture without being aware of it.

There's a couple of ways that one can work with those issues on a more systemic level that I think are more productive. One is in raising awareness of the way that a community of people interacts — both the adults and the students within a school. If everyone knows each other, then a lot of these physical devices are not as necessary to deal with folks who might be intruding or improperly coming into the school environment.

The question of school size is one that we haven't talked about yet, but by having a smaller-scale community to begin with, it's easier for everyone to know whether a person does or doesn't belong in the school. And if a kid is disturbed or dealing with too many issues at home and is experiencing difficulty, the community is more likely to know it. It's much less easy to be anonymous and fall through the cracks in a smaller-scale environment.

AS&U: How can design facilitate this type of environment and help create a more secure school? And how will school size play into future school design and planning?

Blurock: I don't think there is any question that the size of the learning community and the degree to which people know each other and take responsibility has as much effect on security as anything. But in terms of the actual design of schools, there's a fairly good body of knowledge that deals with the issue of almost invisibly creating secure environments.

The degree to which people see each other and can't hide from each other increases security. The degree to which you can control the perimeter increases security. The degree to which you can prevent conflicts from happening, like people running into each other in the hallways, increases security. Interestingly, an awful lot of these things have positive educational effects. We've talked about sort of opening up the educational environment; this has a positive security effect. The key is keeping it at that level rather than letting the culture of fear make schools like prisons.

Dyck: Anonymity is the greatest single enemy of security.

Loeffelman: There's also the issue of getting teachers out of their office or classroom and being part of the community. There's a lot in terms of inferred supervision if they're out there and they can help with issues of security.

There also is a question of transparency in schools. I am seeing more and more glass within a school. This has two advantages: it increases the ability for inferred supervision, and it provides the advantage of engaging students in providing a real sense of all of the learning opportunities and activities that are available within the school community.

AS&U: I'd like to look at the concept of functionality of the school building itself, and what can be done today to ensure schools are prepared for potential future uses?

Blurock: Function is what you want something to do, and we need to really spend more time investigating that rather than pulling schools out of drawer 24 and rebuilding them again, which happens all too often.

Loeffelman: If you look at the classic schools, like Crow Island and Cranbrook, they've adapted to change. Why is that? It's because they have a variety of spaces, they are flexible, they give signals of how the spaces are used, and there is no doubt that they also have very proactive programs as to teacher development and the delivery system. Every school success story that I am aware of is a true integration of educators, students, parents, the larger community — and sometimes the architect.

Leonard: The function and use of a school will clearly change over the life of that building. Going back to the open-plan model, the reason they were not good buildings and they failed is just that, they were not good buildings. Open-plan schools basically cut out the corridors, thereby cutting square footage to save money. And if square footage hadn't been cut, when you put those corridors back in, it could have worked better.

With open-plan schools, you couldn't break down the mechanical system to serve a new layout. You put in fewer windows because you didn't need as much glass and light to penetrate these large spaces. But what that did is hindered breaking down spaces into smaller units. Those were flaws in a built environment, in a building, that made that building not function later on when it had to adapt to the change.

So I think that we just have to know that change is going to happen and try to accommodate change. The key is to make basic good buildings; buildings that will last for 50 years, 100 years, and bring some stability and continuity to a community, and allow those buildings to change over time.

Dyck: In times of change, the word functionality and flexibility are almost the same. We'd also be remiss if we didn't include integration and community as being part of that functionality/flexibility, because I think the relationship of the school and community will become more and more integrated.

AS&U: Earlier it was mentioned that not only is the majority of our school stock already in place, but also that there still is much need for additional schools. I'd like to take a look at adaptive reuse and how communities can capitalize on alternative spaces to meet growing education facilities needs.

Blurock: Besides just the availability of space, I think working in an existing building creates some very interesting opportunities. Being in a highly constrained environment, such as an adaptive reuse — or even an unconstrained environment — stretches your imagination and makes you think of new things.

We recently worked on a project where instead of being restrained by how little space there was, there was actually an abundance of space, which was a very interesting problem because we don't usually face that. It gave us the opportunity to think of things that we could do that we weren't doing before. It stretched the creative process and created some interesting and, I think, valuable learning environments.

So the degree to which that can happen is one of those areas of experimentation where some real change can be explored, because you have to. Additionally, adaptive reuse often requires the schools to think anew about stuff.

Dyck: It's these little cubbies and so-called “wasted spaces” you can take advantage of in adaptive reuse that brings real interest and meaning to a learning setting. Some of these accidental things that happen in a reuse project can really and truly enhance the flexibility and utility of the actual learning experience.

Loeffelman: I think a good example is at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, where a middle school was put inside Renwick Cathedral. You never would have designed it that way if you were starting from the ground up. I can't imagine suggesting to a client that you're going to build a gothic cathedral and then we're going to put a school in it.

The spaces that resulted are really quite phenomenal. What will be really interesting is how the school, in terms of the teachers and administration, learn how to use that building as a teaching tool over the next 20 years. However, they have a long history of innovation in education and trying all sorts of different approaches. The overall planning process and result could not have happened if they had not come to the table with that kind of frame of reference.

So here was a client who was a huge risk-taker and willing to consider putting something in as strange a place as that. It forces you to think about things differently so you come up with different models that then can be used for other locations.

Hendricks: Some of the most successful examples of adaptive reuse are the serendipitous buildings that were not intended to be schools. And it's almost the lack of fit between the original use and the new use that creates some of these wonderful in-between spaces that provide for the kinds of spaces that we are looking for, such as breakout areas to do other kinds of learning, small-group areas and large-group activity areas.

The most difficult buildings to adapt to today's needs are traditional high schools from the '50s and '60s. The high schools from the '20s, for example, had more gracious corridors and were more generous in their total floor area, affording opportunities to create zones that are outside the traditional classroom where other kinds of activities can happen; other kinds of groups can get together and a greater variety of learning activities can happen.

In the '50s and '60s, things were being done so quickly and so cost effectively that all of those kinds of generous spaces were no longer built and, therefore, those rigid 30 x 30 boxes are very difficult to adapt. One must essentially take 20 percent of the floor area and open up one in every handful of classrooms and to create the resource areas that allow other kinds of learning activities.

Leonard: One of the great things about adaptive reuse is that it forces you to address context. It also moves beyond the building and gets to site issues and buildings within communities. We actually can start to not break down and recreate communities, but build on what's been done before and help that maturation process of communities by working with what we've got.

Blurock: One of the themes that's gone through this whole discussion is the more input, the more constraints, the more things that we deal with, which really comes down to the process of design rather than the result of design, is really what's going to ultimately create the richness and the change and the things that schools will become rather than the things that they have been. And this is true whether you're talking about sustainability, community, adaptive reuse, functionality, all of these issues sort of touch on that.

We should look for the unusual, look for the constraints, look for the things that make us think in ways that we haven't thought of before. Out of that is going to emerge the future.