In this article, one of six in ARCHITECT's 2021 "What's Next" series on post-vaccine architecture, contributor Gideon Fink Shapiro speaks with Prakash Nair, AIA, founding president and CEO of Education Design International, based in Lutz, Fla., on his observations and vision for the design of K-12 schools in the near- and long-term. With 35 years of experience, Nair has worked on educational projects throughout the nation, with both EDI and with Fielding Nair International.
How has the pandemic affected K–12 design, and do you expect to see any lasting impact post-vaccine?
Nair: The primacy of the classroom has come into question because of the pandemic. That is a good thing because classrooms are not effective places for learning. My hope is that even if we aren’t going to get out of the classroom altogether, schools will resist the temptation to return to the teacher-directed model of education for which the traditional classroom is best suited.
What’s the matter with classrooms?
Classrooms are ideal for synchronous teaching—a place where teachers and students are required to be at the same time. Now with online learning thrown into the mix, I hope there will be more development of asynchronous models where teachers and students can connect spontaneously as needed. Asynchronous models are also being tried out in physical settings. Schools can still be valuable places, but only if they reinvent themselves. They can become places that we want to go to because we can do things there that we can’t do at home.
What activities can happen only at school?
Schools can offer access to specialized technology such as laser cutters or 3D printers. Most of the problems in today’s world have to be solved by communities of people. Schools can become research centers where people are learning to put their heads together for creative and practical problem-solving. And, of course, there’s a social aspect to it. The school environment can help students cultivate social and emotional intelligence.
When did develop your critique of the traditional corridors-and-classrooms model?
I was the director of operations for New York City’s public school construction program from 1989 to 1999. During that time, we built more than a hundred schools and renovated several hundred others. I began to realize that we, as architects, were reinforcing a defunct model of education, so I started my own company with a different approach. I want architecture to allow education to fully realize its promise of truly getting children in the place where they need to be and to become successful, both personally and in careers. Over the past 20 years, our practice has expanded to 52 countries on six continents, which we take as evidence of a worldwide urge to find new ways to educate our children.
How do you design for user experience to reflect that vision of education?
In the case of schools, the clients are usually bureaucracies or administrators, so the ultimate end users—teachers and students—too often have not had the architect’s full attention. The result is that students are held prisoner in uncomfortable, small rooms for hours on end and under the watchful eye of adult wardens—what teachers unfortunately have become in the traditional model. The pandemic experience for most children has not been much better because they are now being fed, by computer, the same one-size-fits-all user experience. But some schools have seen stay-at-home mandates as an opportunity to make the remote learning experience more personally fulfilling, interesting, and rewarding. The big question is whether schools will move toward a more child-centered, more humane model. That is the future.
When students are allowed to return to school in full numbers without masks, how would you like to see schools transform?
I’m hoping that whatever we do with the physical place called school matches our expectations of what we want our students to become. We need to cultivate thinking individuals through an interdisciplinary approach to education. When you have science, math, and social studies happening in different classrooms, disconnected from each other, you’re not allowing students to think holistically about the world and its interconnected problems. A different education system requires a different curriculum and, by extension, a different learning environment.
The pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated racial and social disparities. How can post-vaccine education design promote greater equity and opportunity?
School design has always penalized marginalized and underserved populations who, in many cases, happen to be racial minorities. Children come to school with very different needs. I agree with the personalized, student-centered model advocated by Yvette Jackson in her book The Pedagogy of Confidence (Teachers College Press, 2011). We can break down the classroom walls to create a variety of small, medium, and large spaces that are differentiated, furnished, and equipped to facilitate a wide variety of learning modalities tailored to the needs of each individual learner. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to start dealing with those inequities.
Can you convert a traditional school building relatively inexpensively into a more dynamic learning community?
Given that we have about $2 trillion or more invested in our physical school buildings, we can’t throw them away. The good news is that most of the traditional “cells and bells” school buildings—basically classrooms with corridors—are column-and-beam structures. So the vast majority of the infill walls are nonstructural. By taking down some of those interior walls, you can rethink the architectural layout without huge expenditures. Over the course of a summer, we can quite easily convert a traditional school into a learning-community school that meets the learning needs of today’s children. The main barrier is not financial; it’s having wider agreement that this kind of change is a good thing.
Do you have projects in development that were initiated after the pandemic had already begun to affect schools?
Yes. Some of the projects in the pipeline have slowed down, but our message seems to resonate better now because of the pandemic's challenges. For example, the appetite for outdoor learning has increased because of social distancing, but being outside has other benefits. We want to create spaces where students can spread out and not waste all of that hallway space. The schools that we're designing now in the U.S. and abroad are as innovative as they've ever been, if not more so. I'm hopeful that when we come out of this, we are going to be moving toward a more humane and student-centered way to educate children.
Are you anticipating a school construction boom post-pandemic?
Demand has been suppressed by the pandemic and that might result in a mini boom in the school-building business later. While that may be good for architects and contractors, I don’t know how good it is for kids. It’s time to think about education as a responsibility that is shared by the whole community, including businesses, cultural organizations, professional entities, higher education, and industrial institutions.
We have many facilities that lie vacant during the school day, like the YMCA, public parks, and museums. If education is not bound by the physical place that we call school, then it can become a much richer experience. By using wider community resources as extensions of school, we can construct fewer new facilities. The business opportunity for the school-building industry is the renovation of existing school buildings to make them more compatible with today’s needs.
How are you advising your clients to incorporate outdoor learning spaces into their master plans?
As I wrote in "Outdoor Learning: Leave the Classroom Behind," outdoor spaces provide opportunities for high-quality learning. Children of all ages can step away from their screens, commune with nature, and be more active. Outdoor areas are conducive to developing skills like critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and social and emotional development—not to mention that outdoor learning environments are substantially cheaper to create than comparably effective environments indoors. When we start a project, we look at the entire site for opportunities for learning, both indoors and outdoors. There is no reason why we should waste even 1 square inch of space outside.
Does this apply to climates with four seasons including winter as well as the more temperate regions?
Yes, definitely. Children want to be outdoors in any climate. There's no such thing as bad weather—just bad clothing. Even in Minneapolis, children can do outdoor work in -20 F, though obviously most places aren't as extreme. Unless there's a tornado or a hurricane, I would say there's almost no weather in which learning cannot be taken outside.
Has the pandemic affected your thinking about open versus closed spaces? On the one hand, you’ve argued for openness and student mobility within the learning environment, and on the other hand, schools have implemented separate cohorts and pods to limit the spread of the virus.
I don't want to go back to the forced dichotomy of open or closed learning spaces. In the 1970s, we had something called “open schools” and they had major problems. When you put a hundred students in an open area with a bunch of teachers who are still basically trying to control the action as they did in the classroom, it doesn’t work. Instead of open versus closed, we should talk about providing appropriate spaces for the activities being conducted. The type of environment you need depends on whether you're reading quietly, communing with nature, writing, or researching on the internet. The important thing is to have variety.
One big realization from the pandemic is air quality. If the virus spreads through ventilation systems, as we saw with cruise ship cabins, then trapping kids in classroom boxes doesn't really help. We’ll need to design ventilation systems that prevent the spread of pathogens between areas. Increasing the amount of fresh air that children are able to breathe is also important for their health and well-being.
How do you guide your clients toward informed and newer approaches?
Most of our clients come to us specifically because they are no longer satisfied with traditional school design. But clients need to understand that the school construction budget is actually a Trojan Horse toward educational enhancements. So rather than look at school buildings simply as places to keep children safe, warm, and dry, we can direct school construction monies in ways that will substantially improve learning outcomes. Whether you're an urban school district or a rich community, ultimately everybody wants children to succeed. By investing in architecture that builds on students' strengths rather than emphasizes their weaknesses, we can not only improve their traditional academic outcomes, but also make sure that they're graduating with essential life and career skills.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
