Edge cases engage architects because they provide opportunities to experiment, and they act as provocation to other work. Although I am no expert at the planning of educational facilities, I have participated in the design of enough schools to notice patterns emerge. The educational philosophies, area models, and design committees each have features that are unique, but they rhyme with each other in fundamental ways. This is why an edge case is so fascinating. Two years ago I was involved in the design of one such edge case, a one classroom STEM space, or a STEM cell. The Sustainability, Engineering, and Design (SED) Lab featured dense programming, immersive student involvement, and an unexpected post-occupancy life that have all informed my career since.
STEM Cell: One Space, Many Purposes
STEM facility planning has been codified to include four different types of space: the classroom, the laboratory, the presentation space, and the shop. We see these components whether it’s an entire school designed to support a STEM curriculum or only a suite of rooms dedicated to STEM classes. In these circumstances there is a one to one relationship between a room and a function.
How does one define these four functions in one room? The design of the SED Lab would have failed if we tried to give each of these STEM components their own share of the room, so instead we marginalized the fixed aspects of each of these types of space and gave the rest of the room over to rapidly reconfigurable furniture that could support any of these STEM components. Stated succinctly, rather than design one room crowded with four types of space that exist simultaneously, we designed a STEM cell, one room that has the potential to toggle between four types of space.
Degree of Student Engagement
We didn’t plan for student involvement on the SED Lab. We were (pleasantly) ambushed with it. At our first meeting the instructor brought three of his students, and as soon as we began to discuss the project an “urgent call” of indeterminate length took the teacher away. Heading out the door, he recommended we continue without him. That his students appeared unsurprised by this turn of events cued us to engage our student collaborators. Later we learned that the three students were using their involvement in the classroom redesign as a capstone project for his class.
I could not generalize to every project, so I will speak to specifics: the involvement of these students in this project enriched the design fundamentally. The students were fanatical about physically prototyping the design. At the earliest stages this took the form of sketch models of the entire classroom, but later as the scale of our work shrunk to details, the scale of their models expanded to full size prototypes of custom lab furniture, fixed presentation station casework, and flexible seating. The students also completed “design homework”. For example although we selected the finishes, one of the students completed interior design studies under our guidance to determine the color scheme, where those colors would be used, and in what quantities. Tasks like these enabled the students to own their space and become knowledgeable about the best uses of their SED Lab.
Post-Occupancy Hacking
After two years of classes in the space the teacher and his rapidly increasing enrollment of students can point to the limitations of their SED Lab. I don’t think this indicates a failure in design. I see it as an inevitable reality when a STEM curriculum closely tracks the technology component. The teacher wishes for less reference book storage and more student project display. The students wish for more work surfaces for soldering stations and other maker activities. The engineers and designers that visit the class as resources wish for a temporary touch down station.
In many cases the story might end there, but much like those first three students, the new classes have avidly prototyped solutions to the above limitations. A once useful bookcase has been dismantled and repurposed into a soldering station. A little used corner of the room now has a table with a whiteboard surface for guest professionals. Is it the room that affords opportunities for beneficial hacks? Is it the teacher who assures them that the space is not so precious that it can’t be altered? Is it the curriculum that fosters the imagination and skillset to hack their space to meet their evolving educational needs?
Lessons Learned
The Sustainability, Engineering, and Design Lab was a useful edge case that has provoked me to greater efforts to understand the relationships between program and space, to communicate design intent to clients and to not just hear but to listen to the feedback from stakeholders in the design process, and to imagine a future for built work that is not static, but has capacity for experimentation and growth.