Design For Flexibility

Today's new school can be state-of-the-art in 2055

By Ezra D. Ehrenkrantz and Stanton Eckstut

Ezra D. Ehrenkrantz, FAIA, and Stanton Eckstut, FAIA, are principals at Ehrenkrantz & Eckstut, a New York City-based architectural and planning firm that specializes in large-scale urban design, mixed-use commercial and residential projects, public buildings, historic preservation, and school facilities.

The United States enters a new technology cycle every four years, incorporating technological advances into our culture at least twice a decade. The video games, laptop computers, and fax machines of 1990 are already old news, because new products and technologies are constantly entering the marketplace.

This relentless technological change is now a basic fact of American life, and it has profound ramifications for school facilities. Every school district wants to attract the best teachers and administrators and expand the ways its students can learn. But where do you start? How can you design and build new schools for the high-tech future when you don't know--and can't know--exactly what that future will hold 10 years or 20 years from now?

This challenge is particularly daunting for school facilities, because schools are among the most complex buildings in our communities, serving many different uses and functions. Not only do schools serve as facilities for education, they now provide before and after-school day care, three-meal-a-day nutrition programs, and community outreach activities.

School buildings must have a flexible design to accommodate these different activities, and they must be durable enough to stand up to continuous use. Historically, U.S. school buildings are used an average of from 50 years to 60 years. The facilities we build today must still be viable, functioning institutions in the year 2055.

Just as school boards and administrators in 1935 could not have imagined the dramatic changes in classrooms, curricula, and education philosophies reflected in our 1995 schools, so, too, you have no crystal ball you can use to peer into 2055.

But you don't have to work blindly. You can't anticipate every detail of future technology, but you can plan strategically and build for the perpetual evolution in technology, education goals, and curricula through innovative architectural design based on flexibility, diversity, and expansion.

In our experience designing schools, we have found the following five strategies will help ensure that new buildings can successfully evolve along with technology.

1. Create a districtwide strategic plan. In the past, districts planned new schools and retrofitted existing ones, and the new and old facilities were designed to do the same old thing. Today, however, the rules have changed. It's no longer business as usual, and that necessitates a shift in management thinking and approach.

A strategic plan is a reflection of--and a tool for--that shift in direction. It creates a synergy between new and old facilities that lets you deliver comparable education quality across the district. Your strategic plan will chart a new future for your district.

Develop the strategic plan by working with a technology expert and an architect. Together, you can plan ways to use technology to increase learning opportunities and determine the best physical environment that will promote and support beneficial education evolution. To make the best possible use of school facilities, the planning team should examine and evaluate existing facilities--their condition, what they can and cannot do, and what facilities and services you need to bring your district up to its optimum capability. Each new school should incorporate technology into instruction and encourage similar activities in existing buildings by installing a computer network within the district that enables the older facilities to access the new technology.

By combining your school district's physical master plan and your educational master plan into a single coordinated strategic plan for the entire district, you get the most use out of your existing assets and tight budgets. In turn, your strategic plan will help sell new school bond issues to the voters by demonstrating how one new school can significantly improve the effectiveness of other schools--for example, by creating a master collection of library resources to which each school has access.

2. Design diversity and flexibility into the school. Today, different educational styles and philosophies are working side by side, often in the same classroom: the traditional teacher-stands-in-front-of-the-class method, clusters of students working individually or in small groups, cooperative learning, and peer tutoring. Technology can be incorporated into any and all of these processes.

In planning and building new schools, or renovating existing facilities to incorporate technology, don't forget that computers don't inhabit the classroom--teachers and students do. You are designing schools for people, and they have certain requirements that are essential to any age or educational philosophy.

A place to learn should have simple, flexible rooms of various sizes, which can be adapted over time to changing uses and needs, while retaining their attractive human design and scale to foster a nurturing environment for students and teachers alike. A flexible school design will support people's freedom to choose and create the setting that best meets their needs.

But flexibility does not imply chaos. The changing classroom setting should occur within a fixed, clearly organized framework that keeps everything on track. Build rooms that can be easily rearranged, and make use of partitions that can be removed as needed. Plan classrooms to accommodate changing designs and configurations of desks and workstations. To promote flexibility, add sufficient service networks and electrical outlets for computers and other equipment in the ceilings, walls, and floors, and be sure various parts of the school can call upon these high-tech capabilities as needed.

Of equal importance, make sure every room has lots of good natural light. High ceilings give the best quality light, provided shading systems control glare as needed. More windows mean a better human environment and lower utility bills.

Remember that increased use of technology requires a greater variety of spaces to accommodate the equipment. By building diversity and flexibility into classrooms, you provide a stimulating environment for today's students and give future generations every option to follow whatever technology, educational philosophy, and practice will then be in use. Similarly, libraries, multimedia centers, cafeterias, and gyms should be built to serve a variety of uses now and in the future.

3. Anticipate technology needs in new construction. You can't know exactly what your school's technology needs will be in five or 10 years, but you can assume some basic requirements, such as adequate electrical wiring, good lighting, and environmental controls for computers and other equipment. Make provision for these requirements in new construction now. For example, install conduits during construction and route them to a central control location so that more wiring can be added later with less cost and disruption.

Equally important, anticipate the need for greater capacity, more control zones, and greater communications. In a new school, you might need twice the number of watts per square foot than was the rule in schools built 10 or 20 years ago. So, provide ample space for panels and control equipment, including a central control space that will take the feeds from smaller decentralized locations on each floor.

Here's where a strategic plan that anticipates the need for technological upgrades can save you money. Without such a plan, your district might decide to rewire a school for any and all high-tech contingencies, building in great capacity without knowing what percentage of that capacity will really be used, or even where in the school it will be used. Then, if you don't use every single foot of that wiring, or every bit of that cooling, you will have wasted money that should have gone elsewhere in your budget.

Instead, decide what percentage of the school's activities require high-tech facilities. Target what portion is appropriate and then add 20 percent additional capacity, as an insurance policy. By designing in flexibility and anticipating technology needs, you are giving your schools every chance for success and longevity. Your out-year budgets will thank you.

Most important, don't make a specific technology the central feature of your design. In this world of rapid technological evolution, your school runs the risk of becoming obsolete within a decade or less. Instead, design technology and its future administration into the background of your schools where it won't impinge on human activity, or even human awareness, but stands ready to evolve as your needs dictate.

4. Don't do work that must be undone in the future. In other words, don't build in rigid structure and technology that might become out-of-date in 10 or 20 years and have to be replaced. Commitment to one and only one technology now means rapid obsolescence and high replacement costs.

Don't design the building, the classrooms, and the media services in a rigid format that refuses to accommodate the changes that certainly will be needed in the future. Inflexible design today means high renovation costs tomorrow.

Instead, use your strategic plan to anticipate how your facility will evolve over time, and design for that change in your physical layout. Technology is a part of the school's infrastructure, supporting a myriad of activities within the building. The school's physical structure provides the rigid elements that hold up the building, protects the infrastructure, and nourishes and shields the students and teachers within.

Think of a lake: The land surrounding a lake provides its physical structure, the water provides the necessary infrastructure to support aquatic life and activities, and the flora and fauna can change with the seasons. So, too, with a school: The building structure stays in place, the infrastructure supports its activities, and the classroom and educational techniques can change at will.

5. Maintain the present to build for the future. Your strategic plan can also help you come to terms with the need to fund ongoing maintenance. You have three options: You can wait until there is a crisis and do emergency work. You can fix what needs to be repaired on a school-by-school basis. Or, you can incorporate a districtwide retrofit into your strategic plan.

Combining maintenance with technological upgrades helps you move all of your schools into the 21st century and saves you money--if you incorporate both into your strategic plan. Planned work makes it possible to piggyback technology upgrades onto maintenance work, saving time and money while holding disruption at the minimum for your students and teachers.

Any strategic plan should anticipate what maintenance work needs to be done and organize it into economic packages so you get good value for every dollar spent and have an appropriate mix of what your own maintenance people repair and what you contract out. To obtain this mix, you must anticipate, not just react to each new situation.

You can hire specialty contractors, for example, to fix windows on a unit-price basis. Unit pricing is a method of serial contracting, in which you contract for the first of a series of tasks (such as repairing windows of a number of buildings) that extend over a period of time. If the contractor performs well and maintains tight cost control on the first building, you can extend the contract to include additional buildings, possibly adjusting the contract price to achieve the lowest unit cost. Compared to having a single contract for all the buildings--which would involve one price and one performance--the unit price strategy can save your district thousands of dollars in the long term.

You can also use ongoing maintenance and repair work to prepare a school for technology retrofits. If you have to patch and repaint plaster walls in a 60-year-old school, don't stop there. During this repair work, add conduits for future communications systems or upgrade your electrical wiring.

If you have to replace the heating or air-conditioning in a school built in the 1960s, make provision for high-tech equipment's greater ventilation and cooling requirements. Otherwise, you'll be building a school piece by piece all over again, on the eve of the 21st century.

When you know what maintenance work needs to be done, you can also piggyback technology retrofits onto government-mandated improvements. If work must be done anyway, make the most of it. By anticipating renovation work that will be done in two or three years, you can have the electrical engineer or communications systems designer show you now what kind of computer network will be most appropriate for each school and the district as a whole, and you can incorporate that into your maintenance plan. Then, by coordinating your physical plan (maintenance and retrofits) with your educational master plan, you can schedule the work to reduce as much as possible the disruption to students and administrators and get the most work for your scarce dollars.

By addressing technology needs today through new construction, maintenance, and retrofitting--all coordinated through a districtwide strategic plan--you are creating schools that will offer high-quality education far beyond the typical 50-year lifespan of a school building. In other words, you will achieve the greatest value for every dollar spent. And you will be building a future that will serve not just your children, but your grandchildren and great-grandchildren as well.