HomeDiagramsDatabaseMapsForum About
     

Go Back   SkyscraperPage Forum > Discussion Forums > Buildings & Architecture


Reply

 
Thread Tools Display Modes
     
     
  #1  
Old Posted Oct 10, 2015, 10:41 PM
M II A II R II K's Avatar
M II A II R II K M II A II R II K is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
Posts: 52,200
Why Don't All Schools Look Like Crow Island School?

Why Don't All Schools Look Like This One?


Oct 9, 2015

By ZACH MORTICE

Read More: http://www.citylab.com/design/2015/1...is-one/408886/

Quote:
Crow Island School, in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois, is a beloved icon of progressive school design. With bright and airy L-shaped classrooms, exquisite material details, and kiddie-scaled everything, Crow Island is something like the Seagram Building of elementary schools. Celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, the school’s influence has reached far and wide.

- Crow Island was an early project of Lawrence Perkins, founder of the now-global architecture firm Perkins + Will, who used the school to set in motion a prolific education-design practice. Eliel and Eero Saarinen, the renowned Finnish-born father and son architects, were the school’s other designers, brought on by the district to a lend top-shelf sensibility to Perkins’ young and hungry firm. --- The school received the prestigious Twenty-Five Year Award from the American Institute of Architects in 1971, the only K-12 education building ever to be so honored. Crow Island is typically regarded as the first Modernist elementary school building in North America.

- True to this Modernist ethos, Crow Island distinguished itself through a break with the past. Like most all public buildings, the design of schools through history paraded through a succession of historical stylistic tropes: Gothic, Neoclassical, Beaux Arts, “all proportioned to the rules and proclaiming their cultural affiliations by pale symbols of Latium,” reported Architectural Forum in a 1940 article on Crow Island. There was not much on-the-ground assessment of how schools actually functioned and how students used them. “Crow Island turned all that upside down,” says education architect Steven Turckes, of Perkins + Will.

- Each room is an L-shape, with a main instruction space formed by two wide window walls, and a smaller, flexible work space where kids can step away from day-to-day, teacher-led instruction and focus on longer-term projects. The work zones, says Beth Hebert, a former principal, “are the original maker-space, places where students can go to create things of their own design.” --- The school’s classrooms look out to a lush forested public park, and all have cozy, landscaped courtyards. The landscaping throughout is pleasingly overgrown and filled with shaded nooks and crannies to explore, offering places to practice the skills of seclusion and concentration.

- The combination of secluded outdoor space, a variety of instruction areas, and each classroom’s own sink and bathroom made each class a self-contained village of its own; a cloistered place to try on different responsibilities and activities. Crow Island was far more child-centered than previous generations of schools. Door handles and custom-designed furniture were all child-scaled. --- “It was their own little world within the larger context of the school,” says Turckes.

- The school emphasized the Bauhaus ideal of integration of all arts by including playful ceramic animal sculptures by Eero’s wife Lilian Saarinen. Crow Island’s commitment to Modernism didn’t make it stark—the Saarinens’ brickwork also offers unexpected flourishes, like a blueprint of the building in raised brick. --- In the school’s basement is the “Pioneer Room,” a faux log cabin where students dip candles and spin wool. This room’s inclusion shows that Crow Island has never been too precious about its own legacy. The school is made of simple and durable materials, like the ponderosa pine that panels each classroom, which teachers have used to pin students’ work to the walls for 75 years.

- After the debut of Crow Island in 1940, the next great boom in school building came in the Baby Boom years. Many of those schools copied Crow Island, but only its most basic elements: an asymmetrical single-story made of brick, with strong horizontal lines and large windows. What emerged was the classic postwar school box, a “factory model,” says school architect John Dale. --- Some early Modern-era schools (like Perkins + Will’s Heathcote School) applied the Crow Island template directly and included the material detailing that made it a standout. In 2001, 47 years later, Perkins + Will featured the same asymmetrical chimney tower and broad expanses of windows in its Harold G. Fearn Elementary School.

- A few recent primary school projects have adopted the model wholeheartedly, emphasizing the same multipurpose, independent learning spaces and artful floor-to-ceiling windows. They include Cranbrook Kingswood Girls Middle School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and Trillium Creek Primary School in West Linn, Oregon. --- But most school districts were more reluctant than the affluent North Shore suburb of Winnetka to invest in an idiosyncratic building, ostensibly more expensive to build and maintain. (Actually, at a cost of $287,000, Crow Island came in under budget, according to the Chicago Reader.) School districts preferred standardization to Crow Island’s sense of exploration, play, and artistry.

.....













__________________
ASDFGHJK
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #2  
Old Posted Oct 10, 2015, 11:03 PM
photoLith's Avatar
photoLith photoLith is offline
Ex Houstonian
 
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Pittsburgh n’ at
Posts: 15,476
Uh, because they dont....
__________________
There’s no greater abomination to mankind and nature than Ryan Home developments.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #3  
Old Posted Oct 11, 2015, 8:51 PM
Jasoncw's Avatar
Jasoncw Jasoncw is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Detroit, Michigan
Posts: 402
Why aren't all schools designed by talented and passionate architects, instead of profit driven design mills?

There are still good school buildings (and other types of buildings) built now and then, but the overwhelming majority of architects don't take their tasks seriously.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #4  
Old Posted Oct 14, 2015, 4:40 AM
ardecila's Avatar
ardecila ardecila is offline
TL;DR
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: the city o'wind
Posts: 16,356
I grew up in another Chicago suburb... my elementary school actually drew a lot of lessons from Crow Island. Another Perkins + Will building from the 1940s. It had really cool walls of glass, a pitched roof, low eaves, and wood cathedral ceilings.

Ultimately it was torn down after years of deferred maintenance... the original building was costly to maintain and to heat/cool. The replacement is an complete shitbox, but it uses off-the-shelf materials and everything can be repaired or replaced cheaply.

There's also the problem that teaching theories come and go. My middle school was originally designed with no hallways, just an interlocking series of trapezoidal classrooms. You would walk through one to get to the next, it was all about breaking down barriers. This caused problems with sound, so they shrank the classrooms into traditional rectangles and put in hallways, but the walls between classrooms were movable partitions to allow for team teaching. This solved the sound issue, but teachers hated moving walls around. Once computers arrived, the school needed far more outlets so eventually replaced the movable walls with fixed ones. The nice little courtyards that everyone likes at Crow Island are actually difficult to supervise - the ones at my elementary school were locked up and off-limits.
__________________
la forme d'une ville change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d'un mortel...

Last edited by ardecila; Oct 14, 2015 at 4:56 AM.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #5  
Old Posted Oct 14, 2015, 10:39 PM
RobEss's Avatar
RobEss RobEss is offline
Walk taker
 
Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: Brooklyn
Posts: 489
The Crow Island school is of the perfect scale and sensibility for an elementary or middle school, but I'm not sure I would have enjoyed going to High School in a similar structure. Part of the exuberance of moving into 9th grade was leaving dim hallways and low ceilings behind and entering a space with rotundas, arched hallways and lots of natural light.

As schooldesign.com puts it, my own high school employed "...the main street concept, which is a wide core at the center of the school with all of the functions branching off the core. Two-story wings on each side of Main Street have four distinct academic sections, and the bottom story has distinct activity and workable areas. A technology resource facility and a common teacher planning area are provided for each cluster."

While it's true the materials in my school were standard and largely undecorated, I'm certain they built a more functional space than on Crow Island. The high ceilings allowed for specialized equipment and spaces - professional catwalks in the theater, hydroponic greenhouses, huge tanks of live tilapia for use in experiments. The academic zones also allowed for more particular inclusions, ranging from vented artist studios, gendered dressing rooms, and private recording booths in the arts wing, to custom weightlifting gyms or broadcasting studios elsewhere in the school. I wouldn't trade the diversity of function that my school provided for any amount of mid-century modernism.

Gimme those high ceilings !

Reply With Quote
     
     
  #6  
Old Posted Oct 14, 2015, 11:26 PM
chris08876's Avatar
chris08876 chris08876 is offline
NYC/NJ/Miami-Dade
 
Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: Riverview Estates Fairway (PA)
Posts: 45,696
That school looks depressing (crow island).

Now this is a high school


Credit: http://www.brsrestores.com/Gallery/EastHighSchool.htm

High Schools with the 1800's colonial style look the best. Same way colleges that have the Oxford look to them reign supreme.

Catholic high schools tend to look much better than your run of the mill public school. There's a sort of elitist feel to them.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #7  
Old Posted Oct 15, 2015, 2:08 PM
brickell's Avatar
brickell brickell is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: County of Dade
Posts: 9,379
my high school was made out of styrofoam and stucco, with a bunch of portables in the back. The only design consideration was stuffing as many kids as possible into it.

But back in those days, they couldn't build schools fast enough. I don't blame them.
__________________
That's what did it in the end. Not the money, not the music, not even the guns. That is my heroic flaw: my excess of civic pride.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #8  
Old Posted Oct 15, 2015, 4:43 PM
Gantz Gantz is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Mar 2013
Posts: 653
Quote:
Originally Posted by chris08876 View Post
That school looks depressing (crow island).

Now this is a high school
Since this is a skyscraper forum, I present this monster from Brooklyn:



Now thats a school.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #9  
Old Posted Oct 15, 2015, 5:52 PM
Nightsky's Avatar
Nightsky Nightsky is offline
Illustrator, editor
 
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: Malmö
Posts: 3,690
Why does most schools look so depressing and so much more neglect and rundown then other buildings? It seems to be the same all over the world...
__________________
Website about my travels in USA and Europe:
http://www.worldtravelimages.net

All my diagram drawings - more than 700!:
http://skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?14670510
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #10  
Old Posted Oct 16, 2015, 9:33 AM
RLS_rls's Avatar
RLS_rls RLS_rls is offline
▓▒░
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Manitoba
Posts: 1,601
My high school was an ambitious design from Etienne Gaboury in the late 60s. It had a multinodal approach with a large multileve main lobby and small entrances and lobbies around the perimeter. I always thought it was dark and run down, a result of decades of poor maintenance. But recently it got a huge renovation with an improved roofline and new everything inside. I appreciate it more as a design now than I did when I was in school, it's one of the few ambitious designs in town-modern or otherwise.
__________________
ಠ_ಠ
Reply With Quote
     
     
End
 
 
Reply

Go Back   SkyscraperPage Forum > Discussion Forums > Buildings & Architecture
Forum Jump


Thread Tools
Display Modes

Forum Jump


All times are GMT. The time now is 5:09 AM.

     
SkyscraperPage.com - Archive - Privacy Statement - Top

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.