The architecture of a school can be the most important factor in a student’s education. At a time when the LAPD is short on money, land and time, redesigning a school can make a hugh difference.

Amid the current public debate over the fate of the Belmont Learning Complex, the breakdown of Los Angeles school facilities and the urgent need for classroom space, the question of architectural quality has been largely absent. Where only recently the plan for 150 new schools funded by Proposition BB was accompanied by widespread discussion about the appropriate architectural form for education, this now seems unimportant in what is perceived as a crisis situation. Calls for intervention by the Army Corps of Engineers, and an intimation of rapid response, have buried any consideration of the architectural solutions being offered, either for renovation of existing facilities or construction of new education complexes. Architectural quality, the implication goes, is time-consuming, costly and unnecessary when confronting an emergency of such proportions.

On one level, this is understandable. For the public, architecture has been reduced to signifying little more than outer appearance, the proper wrapping for important projects, if not the code word for unnecessary expense. Architecture seems more an affair of spectacular, expensive monuments--Richard Meier’s Getty Center complex; Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, or his Disney Hall--that make headlines and draw crowds. The relations between architects and administrators are often couched in terms of the lofty, costly dreamer versus the penny-pinching but realistic client.

But this ignores the contribution of architecture to daily life: its attention to the complex relationships between institutional programs, such as school curricula, and the spaces that house them. This “housing” is not just warehousing, as many administrators seem to feel. Architecture, properly conceived, can provide a fundamental part of the answer to many problems of learning that seem to overwhelm large school districts today.

Architecture is not simply concerned with the technical details of planning and construction but, most important, with the relations between the envisioned curriculum and the space in which it is put into practice. The architect plays a crucial role in the consideration of the complex relations between a large institution and its neighborhood, of the careful responses in scale and spatial layout to the needs of teachers and children, of the very materials out of which a good learning environment is built. Finally, by asking questions that cut across and through the network of administrative bodies responsible for school construction, the architect can serve as catalyst and collaborator, conscience and coordinator.

In short, the design of a school is perhaps the single most important factor in children’s education--as important as the curriculum itself--and a crucial support to the quality of instruction and pupils’ state of mind.

Los Angeles, in fact, was once at the forefront of the movement for better-designed schools, led by influential modern architects like Richard Neutra. Recently, a new generation of architects has developed pioneering projects that work with new concepts of education. Thom Mayne’s brilliant design for Diamond Ranch High School in the hills above Pomona is only one of the projects now being advanced in a wave of interest for the role of design in education. But the Los Angeles school district has, for many decades, proved impervious to such currents, with an attitude toward architecture that subordinates design concerns to cost estimates and blind insistence on state and local “standards” that allow little room for creative innovation.

Yet, Los Angeles architects are especially well-prepared for this task, and in this they continue in a role that architecture has long played in society. For more than two centuries, the design of schools has been a preoccupation of architects concerned with the nature of the spaces in which learning is undertaken. In Europe, architects in the late-18th century were strongly influenced by the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. In his novel “Emile,” Rousseau asserted that a natural, open-air environment was more conducive to learning than the polluted air and fetid streets of the city, and architects responded by producing designs for model schools that stressed ventilation, daylight, relations between inside and outside spaces and the provision of specially scaled spaces for assembly, reading, playing and scientific experimentation.

Pioneers of education theory, from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Friedrich Froebel, followed suit in the 19th century, and many utopian thinkers, from Charles Fourier at the beginning of the century to Edward Bellamy at the end, stressed the need for the environment of learning to be carefully designed for its purpose. All were convinced of the direct effect of space on learning. The proportions of space, the patterns of light, the flow of air, the special configurations for individual and collective work in every size of group and kind of activity--these were concerns that, programmatically sketched in the 19th century, became an integral part of the education-reform movement in Europe and the U.S. from the 1870s on. This was then adopted by modern architects in the 1920s and ‘30s. For Le Corbusier in France, Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus architects in Germany and Neutra in California, architecture itself was conceived as a powerful instrument for social education, and nothing was more important than the first institutional environment encountered by a child: the school.

Perhaps the most striking examples of this belief and hope were the various model schools designed by Neutra in Los Angeles and in Puerto Rico. His project for a Ring Plan School, sketched in the late 1920s, with its ring of classrooms around a play area, and a running track on the roof, was adopted in 1934 by the Los Angeles School Board and built in modified form in the Bell district. The building was much celebrated for its qualities of light, relationship of classrooms to outdoors and color of materials. According to architecture historian Thomas Hines, this “test-tube” school became, together with Neutra’s 1939 Emerson Junior High School on Selby Avenue, “an important model for school building in California and beyond.”

That modern architecture, for all its rhetoric of machine-like functionalism, could produce delightful spaces for learning with the simplest and most economical means is still demonstrated by Neutra and Robert Alexander’s 1957 UCLA Kindergarten and Elementary School, now the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School. Using brick and concrete-block walls, simple truss roofs and plywood cabinets, the architects created a complex and varied environment by careful planning of interior and exterior spaces and a perfect sense of proportion for the different scale of its inhabitants. With additions by Barton Phelps, and set in a diverse landscape of redwoods, streams and playgrounds, this school remains a model for new elementary schools and for the low-density, middle-scale units envisioned as a part of the Proposition BB plan for 150 new schools in Los Angeles.

The invitation by The Times to a number of architects for sketches toward an “ideal” school thus follows a long modern tradition whereby the criteria for school design are worked out in model form before being developed for specific sites and education conditions. The architects’ designs and texts emphasize precisely what is missing from today’s debate: the place of the urban high school in the neighborhood; the relations between open spaces that might become recreational resources for the entire community and teaching and learning spaces; the integral connection between a curriculum and a plan.

Some, built on the idea of the large-scale “campus,” explore the possibilities of a continuously active neighborhood center, for all ages and activities. Others, concerned with the question of scale, work with smaller numbers and real clients. Others, again, focus on the problem of construction, favoring modular planning and prefabricated units for efficiency. All emphasize the role of landscape in the relations between school and neighborhood, inside and outside. One experiments with an innovative interplay between the site and the school, treating the entire landscape as a “building,” half beneath and half above the ground.

All these and other spatial ideas incorporated in these six projects have been a part of architectural and education thinking for some time, and many schools in the Los Angeles area have benefited from them in different ways. But now, in the current climate of urgency and rush to solutions, they bear raising again. Consideration of projects like this should stimulate a thoughtful investigation by a task force, such as that recently assembled by the New Schools Better Neighborhoods coalition, to examine the design options for Proposition BB construction. This could save wasted expenditures on piecemeal remedies now, in favor of sensible investment in buildings and renovations that will serve our children for as long as those planned so wisely by Neutra and his followers more than 60 years ago. *