The Gropius Experiment With British Schools : TOWARD A SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE : The Role of School Building in Post-War England <i> by Andrew Saint (Yale University Press: $40; 267 pp. </i>

Why should American readers be interested in British schools built in the 1940s and 50s? For a start, they might feel gratified that some of the British architects’ ideas came from the United States--from California in particular.

“Few concrete or timber or prefabricated schools were actually built in Britain before the onset of war,” Andrew Saint writes. “Young architects were obliged to cast envious glances at photographs now appearing in the press of light-weight schools designed by Richard Neutra and one or two others in the milder climate and easier economic atmosphere of California, where architectural and educational ideas were coming together in somewhat the same way.”

Postwar school building in England was almost a laboratory experiment in applying the philosophy of Walter Gropius and his German design school, the Bauhaus: the principle that architecture was for everyone, that, in Saint’s words, “architects should focus their attention not on the rich, with their mansions and banks and clubs, but on the poor and the large-scale housing, schools and community building which flowed from that human objective.”

When Gropius came to England in 1934 as a refugee from Nazism, he influenced young architects both by example and by teaching. The example was Impington Village College, a relaxed grouping of classrooms and community space that he designed with British architect Maxwell Fry (who died Sept. 3, 1987).

The teaching was at Liverpool University School of Architecture. At the Architectural Association in London, students were still being asked to design “a house for an admiral on a rocky promontory” as a test piece. In Liverpool, Gropius’ views on how architecture could and should serve society made a great impression on a young student, Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, who is the hero of Saint’s book.

As deputy architect for the county of Hertfordshire (1945-48) and as chief architect to the Ministry of Education (1948-56), Johnson-Marshall did more than anyone to put Gropianism into practice. As one of the school architects (quoted but not named by Saint) said: “Gropius had his ideas. We had the opportunities.”

The postwar schools program put to the test the techniques of prefabrication that Gropius had urged, and showed both their virtues and their limitations. What happened in British school building of the 1940s and 50s stands rather as a classic test case does in the law: something to be referred to, according to one’s opinions, as a lustrous example or a horrible warning.

The Butler Education Act of 1944 (nicknamed for a government minister, R. A. Butler, who narrowly missed becoming prime minister 20 years later) guaranteed schooling for all; if children were born, the state promised to educate them up to a certain age.

The postwar baby boom ensured that full advantage would be taken of this provision. Families were being decanted from war-ravaged London into new towns and new estates (building developments) in the counties around London. But money, labor and materials were all in short supply. “How could the meager resources of a near-bankrupt nation be prevented from condemning its children to chicken coops?” Saint asks. Gropius’ answer was that brick-on-brick building techniques unchanged since the time of the Pharaohs must be abandoned in favor of prefabrication with a “kit of parts.”

Stirrat Johnson-Marshall and his architects designed school buildings not as essays, but as part of a language and vocabulary that could be applied throughout Britain. Many of the architects of the counties had served as officers in World War II. War had taught them how to get an idea into quick production with the help of industry and then use feedback to improve on the original.

In a cold country such as England, prefabricating elements of schools in warm factories had big advantages over building by bricks on a windy site.

Other new ideas were being experimented with, besides prefabrication. The architects wanted to break up long, drab, institutional corridors and to stagger classrooms, or teaching spaces as they called them. Child-size wash basins and toilets were designed. Bright colors were introduced after the monotony of wartime camouflage gray. (In the surviving schools, these colors have often been toned down. With his keen historical sense, Saint observes: “Today a bold splash of color is devoid of meaning. Forty years ago it could stand for hope and a half-forgotten gaiety.”)

In Hertfordshire, one third of 1% of building costs went toward murals and sculpture. One school, at Stevenage, acquired a sculpture by Henry Moore that now is probably worth considerably more than the school. Vivid curtains and murals were commissioned; they make the most enjoyable color plates in Saint’s book.

Some of the young architects had an almost visionary concept of what a school could be. Nottinghamshire architect Alan Meikle said: “I had a sort of dreamy idea of a kind of building that I’d never really seen before, like a pack of cards you could walk in and out of, which wasn’t all walls, because we were talking about bringing the landscape inside the building.”

Needless to say, that was not quite how things worked out. One of Saint’s most admirable traits is that he makes no attempt to gloss over the failures of a system whose social rationale he clearly and rightly endorses. Too often the “staggered classrooms” deserved the criticism aimed at them by the old-fashioned architect Trystan Edwards: “Do these scattered sheds . . . represent the right expression for a school or do they perhaps too closely resemble a colony for consumptives placed in separate hutments for the benefit of their health?”

With the prefabricated construction, joints leaked, sound carried through partitions, urine ran under partitions between classrooms and toilets, and composition walls discolored. There were some disastrous fires where shortcuts had been taken in assembly methods.

Architects and educationists alike accepted that no exalted level of architecture was likely to result from the prefab system, a desperate measure for desperate circumstances. It was the raising of average standards that was needed. And thousands of children were given acceptable schools.

A new school was finished in England and Wales every day between 1950 and 1970. But, as Saint notes, “One dream never materialized . . . the dream of freely interchangeable structural components, an open system of prefabricated building.” At no stage in the Hertfordshire school building program did the value of components finished off-site amount to half the total value.

What effect did the postwar architecture of Britain have abroad? A British school design won a prize at the Milan Triennale of 1960. But the main influence was on Ezra Ehrenkrantz, a California architect who spent some time at Johnson-Marshall’s Building Research Station around 1954, experimenting with what he hoped would be a universally applicable system of modular coordination, or “preferred dimensions,” as he called it.

He kept in touch with British school building when he returned to the United States and, in 1961, founded School Construction Systems Development, a California response to the system of schools consortia then being practiced in Britain.

Immigration was putting pressure on the state’s schools. But the building program in which all the elements of the California experiment were deployed came to only 13 schools altogether. Saint points out that “the basic features of the English experience, the regular cycle of interaction between designers and clients and its outcome in complete programs of building, could not be transferred to North America because different administrative arrangements obtained there” and anti-trust legislation made it unlawful for any one supplier to monopolize the production of components. The British system, it seemed, was unexportable.

So what is left? A lot of rather bleak, utilitarian schools in the British countryside. The education of a generation which, but for Johnson-Marshall’s vision, might have been left uneducated. And the urgent moral that Andrew Saint draws:

“No more critical task confronts all the skills involved in the construction industry than the struggle to win back resources in order to build justly. . . . If the story of the postwar (British) schools proves anything, it is that with trust and encouragement those involved in building can understand and respond to shortages, overcome barriers. . . . But if they are discouraged, abused, saddled with discontinuities and treated as a means to macro-economic ends, if first cost is perpetually rated higher than value for money, the same story suggests that they will fail.”