Many leaders in industries going through digital transformation experience a certain spine-tickling moment when “futures flip-over” happens. That moment is when you get-it that the previously marginal online offering has become the default and the traditional solution has become the exotic.
It has happened in music, in newspapers, etc., and this is where university campuses and business schools are fast heading as education designers, coders and entrepreneurs close in on online platforms that replicate and in many ways improve on the traditional live experience. All for much less money.
While primary and secondary schooling will continue to be based in buildings in all plausible scenarios, because schooling has a custodial function that cannot be virtualized, tertiary and quaternary (executive education and professional development) campuses are starting to feel like Blockbuster stores in the age of Netflix.
So, goodbye to all that. Or maybe... not quite so fast, according to architectural firm Gensler, which has a practice area in education. It’s not the end, it‘s a renewal.
Real-world university education is eroding, but within this its mix of activities is changing.
Now that students are getting their bread-and-butter learning online, the real world becomes where collaborative, enriching, group learning “experiences” happen. The demands on the space are changing.
How to help that into being is what new education architecture needs to address. The collaborative purpose that used to be secondary has become primary. Form follows function.
In an interview with Forbes.com, Andy Cohen, one of two Gensler Co-CEOs, underlines his three bucket-principles: one, make design for learner-centered, learner-led education. Two, create flexibility adaptable spaces. Three, enable “learning everywhere,” at any time.
Boiling this down to places and spaces, Cohen is seeking an architecture that maximizes the benefit of when students are in the same physical space, getting the most out of that now more rarified occurrence. He talks about encouraging people to link and work and project teams to pop-up in “found spaces” that the architects have artfully left there.
In all this, education building design is following the workplace revolution which for at least two decades has seen office spaces that are open and adaptable, to encourage fluid, collaborative interactions. This itself was office buildings mimicking artisan and design company studio formats.
The doors are coming off the university in much the same way, in favor of flow to allow inputs and influences to rub together “naturally” so as to create the ecosystem that makes interactive learning engagements and experiences more likely.
Such is the residual value of place in an online world.
David Broz, Gensler Education Practice Area Leader, says despite space constraints, universities “don’t need more buildings. They need buildings that are the right size and shapes for learning.”
The problem is old classroom styles can’t meet new active learning protocols. Old world allowed 20 square feet per student, and this was achieved by rows of chairs in the lecture room. But interactive, experiential learning requires 50 square feet per student. So the existing square footage has to be creatively massaged.
“We find we are having to thicken (widen) the programming of what used to be defined as common elements. Hallways and corridors. Now these have a programmatic function worked into them,” says Broz.
