School Design Goes Back to Basics

Educational philosophies go through cycles, and the design of school buildings reflects these modes of thinking. Consider two significant new school construction projects in the San Diego Unified School District.

La Jolla High School’s new science lab and a major classroom addition to Edison Elementary School in the Mid-City area are the most visible results of a long-awaited new wave of construction that began in 1988 with voter approval of Proposition Y, which authorized $145 million in bonds for capital improvements.

Both buildings offer evidence of a radical upheaval in education strategies during the 1980s. The new movement is marked by a return to solid teaching of basic subjects in naturally lighted and ventilated classrooms intimately related to inviting outdoor spaces.

This latest revival of traditional values comes after a polar opposite period that peaked during the 1970s, when progressive education theories dictated open classrooms but security concerns produced that openness within closed-in, claustrophobic buildings nearly devoid of natural light and ventilation.

“We’re not necessarily going back to the good old days, but we are going back to reasonable, humanistic design,” said Jim Geldert, schools architect for the San Diego district. “What happened was, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was an education movement that came out of Florida and swept across the country, driven by a concern for security and promoting ‘loft design’--very flexible, open classroom spaces. Security concerns meant less windows, and people believed air conditioning provided a better environment.”

Now, with education swinging back toward more traditional values, school architecture is drawing on simple, valid design approaches that originated during the 1930s and 1940s.

The $3-million renovation and expansion of Edison Elementary, completed last May, was one of the last projects designed by San Diego architect Lee Platt, who died of Hodgkins disease last year at the age of 41. (The name of the company is now Platt-Whitelaw Architects, with architect Alison Whitelaw in charge.)

Before his death, Platt, the son of the late San Diego architect Robert Platt, who also designed schools, was one of San Diego’s rising talents. His deep sense of local history translated into straightforward buildings that drew on Irving Gill and Mission-era elements such as smooth stucco walls, simple rhythmic window placement and strong connections between indoor and outdoor spaces.

The centerpiece of the Edison addition is a new, two-story 20,000-square-foot classroom wing added behind the original, 1940s L-shaped building at 35th Street and Polk Avenue.

Stylistically, Platt has matched the new building to the low-key original, with its simple stucco walls and rhythmically placed, deep-set windows.

But the real achievement of the addition lies in the planning of spaces between buildings, the way all buildings are now tied together by these public gathering and circulation areas.

The campus’ new heart is an open-air dining area and a small outdoor amphitheater covered by a graceful steel trellis. These intimately related spaces nestle in the crook of the L formed by the existing corner building. Platt added several roll-up garage doors on the side of the cafeteria-auditorium nearby so that on warm days, indoor and outdoor dining areas are joined into one inviting, communal space.

The new classroom wing sits behind and parallel to the longer wing of the existing building. These new and old wings look out on a courtyard softened by San Diego landscape architect Ron Wigginton’s sensitive scheme of beds planted with spiky fortnight lilies, a row of liquidambar trees that change colors with the seasons and trumpet vines that will creep up the new building’s columns.

These days, the school district has a policy that all buildings must be naturally ventilated. Platt had a reputation for energy conserving designs, and the Edison addition is no exception.

Smaller, southern-facing windows provide adequate light without uncomfortable solar heat gains during winter months, while larger northern-facing banks of windows spill softer natural light into classrooms year-round.

Edison Principal Mabel Wigfall credits Platt’s renovation and addition with turning around the atmosphere at her 880-student school, situated in a low-income, ethnically diverse neighborhood where families seldom stay for more than a year or two. Last year, it was cause for celebration when the graduating fifth-grade class included a single member who had attended the school since kindergarten.

Wigfall’s new, inviting office in the remodeled, original building includes a sweeping glass block wall and space for conferences with parents. With the campus spruced up, Wigfall has stepped up efforts to involve parents, including a series of informal morning kaffeeklatsches she gives in the renovated “cafe-torium.”

Where Platt looked to traditional 1930s and 1940s school designs for inspiration, San Diego architect Ralph Roesling of the rising young firm RNP took a more aggressive, contemporary direction in La Jolla, but one which also soundly serves basic functional requirements.

Besides the need for new lab space, La Jolla High needed a means of handicapped access to both the existing science building and the new lab addition next to it.

Administrators considered an elevator, costing hundreds of thousands, but Roesling developed a $50,000 series of spare, elegant concrete ramps and bridges that tie the buildings to each other and to the campus.

While meticulously detailed and extremely attractive, these concrete forms--especially the footings that support the bridges--are too massive. They overpower the lab building behind them.

The new two-story lab building has a raw, elemental strength that comes from solid basic materials used honestly. Concrete was poured with plywood molds that imprinted a wood grain pattern. Attractive, unfinished galvanized steel railings, bare galvanized metal ductwork and exposed rooftop vent pipes made of stainless steel complete this pure mode of expression. (The rooftop clutter of mechanical equipment, however, amounts to a bit much honesty.)

Walls are of stucco. Lower-level concrete walls on the building’s back side tie the addition visually to the campus’s system of low concrete walls that define walkways.

Like the Edison addition, La Jolla High’s new lab building makes optimal use of natural light and air.

Stainless steel awnings over second-floor windows serve as elegant, simple decoration, but they also shade the windows from harsh sunlight and bounce daylight into the classrooms. Generous numbers of windows on the building’s western and eastern walls filter ocean breezes through the labs.

In an era of shrinking education budgets and flagging morale among educators, it’s encouraging to see that new architecture in the San Diego Unified School District reflects a renewed commitment to solid, basic education, and to creating sensible, comfortable environments that can help foster committed teachers and attentive students.