Wright & American High School Architecture

[erban]

What if Frank Lloyd Wright designed and built an American High School during his career? This thought has been on my mind for several weeks now and I actually shudder everytime I pass a high school. They are almost like McMansions for education. You may view my weblog posting about it here: http://prairiemod.typepad.com/prairiemo ... _wrig.html



I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts about this.

[rgrant]

America has always been schizoid about education. One would imagine that educational facilities would be centers for exploring the future and expanding the mind, as they probably claim to be, but they are always housed in environments that call to mind medieval Europe. After WWI thousands of high schools were built across the land with crenelated towers and Gothic arches. Most college campuses are worse. They reflect a fortress mentality that seems determined to keep the modern world at bay. (Tenure, which should be abolished across the board, is a result of the same mentality.)



Frank Lloyd Wright would have done what he could to limit the amount of time students were forced to sit in classrooms for "book larnin'." The building would have been more focussed on the needs of the students and less on the industry of teaching, which has little to do with education. Think of Wyoming expanded. The quality of schooling in this country sucks. FLW knew this, which is why he paid little heed to the educational history of the applicants for apprenticeship. Just being in a high school of his design would have made the experience immeasurably better.

[JimM]

Absolutely right about Wyoming (and the state of education today)...what kid wouldn't benefit from the experience of spending days there?



Unless you've had an ADD kid in and out of public/homeschooling environments, you can't really appreciate the need for alternatives. One bright spot is an experimental "stand up" school I've seen recently which places emphasis on moving about and not being chained to a desk for indoctrination.



Frank was well in front of the power curve on this one, as usual.

[Palli]

The model for school buildings is more accurately prison, total people management. I used to give high school kids architectural tours of their school. It was a simple way to make them understand the physical and pyschological effects of the built environment. It was harder to take the administration and teaching staff on the same tour, more difficult for them to realize that the "people management design" of the building was challenging the "inmates" to personalize the space. Inevitably, that personalization meant adding to the walls in the form of graffitti, the individualized declaration that has an established aesthetic, or worse, marring the facility through vandalism. But to return to point: how would FLW design differ.

First, the building would grow each year, enlarge itself through the design and physical efforts of students.

Classrooms would be smaller and, like a Usonian House, would have large window walls facing an interior landscape of gardens and greenhouses to cultivate plants.

The halls would double as the library with comfortable built-in seating in libraries that would entice and encourage the teenage body to relax, and study for recreation/edification.

This is an interesting rumination and I am now going to formulate it into a group discussion exercise for a teenage seminar we are presenting in May at the Weltzheimer - Johnson House during Commencement weekend.

Thank you. (Can't get back to the chat page to thank the correspondents by name.)

[erban]

This is an interesting rumination and I am now going to formulate it into a group discussion exercise for a teenage seminar we are presenting in May at the Weltzheimer - Johnson House during Commencement weekend.

This would be brilliant for teen discussion, at a Wright structure nonetheless!



These responses thus far have been right on the mark. Frank Lloyd Wright's personal views on education would have most definately informed they way he'd design an American high school. I think of the Froebel blocks that influenced him. These key educational concepts are lost on our current school system. Learning by exploration and discovery. Unlocking natural logic and creativity. How grand would it have been to be a teenager and to have learned this way in an environment, which inspired me/us as students? We can only imagine I guess.

[Bill Pardue]

While clearly not Wright, does anyone have opinions on the prairie-style schools designed by Dwight Perkins in Chicago? Certainly not as radical a departure as being discussed here, but an indication that Wright-related architects were thinking about school architecture.

http://www.prairiestyles.com/perkins_comm.htm



Also an interesting (and long) oral history with Perkins' son at:

http://www.artic.edu/aic/libraries/caohp/perkins.pdf. Lots of commentary on Wright, Mahony, Griffin, etc.

[pharding]

While clearly not Wright, does anyone have opinions on the prairie-style schools designed by Dwight Perkins in Chicago? Certainly not as radical a departure as being discussed here, but an indication that Wright-related architects were thinking about school architecture.

http://www.prairiestyles.com/perkins_comm.htm



Also an interesting (and long) oral history with Perkins' son at:

http://www.artic.edu/aic/libraries/caohp/perkins.pdf. Lots of commentary on Wright, Mahony, Griffin, etc.

His school buildings are wonderful works of architecture.



It is sad to to see the facade of his office preserved without the rest of the building intact. His office facade is just stuck onto the to the new high rise behind it. The wallpaper approach to historic preservation where only the facade of historically significant architecture is preserved in front of new construction is absolutely mindless and an affront to historic preservation. While Washington DC has much to admire about urban design and historic preservation, the city has adopted this stagefront approach to preservation of historic structures.

[Bill Pardue]

Since I'm a bit of a dilettante with all this (I'm just reading Brooks' The Prairie School), I'd appreciate knowing how Perkins' schools really were different from what came before. The various sites are good at showing the Prairie-inflected exteriors, but what innovations did he bring to the actual learning environment?



--Bill Pardue

[Guest]

Since I'm a bit of a dilettante with all this (I'm just reading Brooks' The Prairie School), I'd appreciate knowing how Perkins' schools really were different from what came before. The various sites are good at showing the Prairie-inflected exteriors, but what innovations did he bring to the actual learning environment?



--Bill Pardue

Our firm did an addition to Corkery Elementary School. Same program and budget as the typical Chicago Elementary School, but he made it into beautiful music. The innovatie scheme is now a classic bar with a room attached scheme. This scheme is still popular with architects in this modern world. The room was a true multipurpose room as as opposed to a gymansium only. The multipurpose room had large Sullivanesque arched window at each end. It had the first indoor fire stairs in a public school building in Chicago. The floor to floor height was 16'. He did an incredibly clever, space efficient double helix, intertwined fire stairs. The exterior was stripped of classicism and had a FLW early modern quality about it. The proportions of the architectural componenets were exquisite. The building was clad in a smooth, shiny purplish black iron-spot brick. The building was capped with a beautiful FLWish abstract projecting cornice. This humble building achieved greatness and made a statement about the power of ideas to the young students.



Great architecture is not necessarily more expensive. It just takes a talented and committed architect working with an enlightend client to do great architecture.

[pharding]

That was me. I do not understand what is wrong with the automatic long in function on this website now after they worked on it.

[rgrant]

Paul, I agree with you about "wallpaper preservation." Much ado was made of the saving of McKim Meade & White's wonderful Villard Mansions on Madison Ave when it was saved from the wrecking ball to serve as a fancy porch to a glass shaft shoved up its backside. Go inside and see what a mess they made of it, however. Not so bad, but not all that great either, is Butler Square in Minneapolis. I used to go a block out of my way to work just to pass by the old, empty, ominous warehouse, one of the best works of architecture in the Cities in those days. (A few good things have been built in the past 40 years.) Obviously they could not just dust off the place and open for business, but somehow, in the process if eviscerating the interior, they emasculated the exterior.



But back to education. Perhaps I am alone in this, and I am not by any means an expert, never having been a teacher nor willingly having anything to do with anyone under the age of 21, but I do think the entire process of schooling in this country does not meet the definition of education. The base word is the Latin "educare," which means to draw out. All learning opportunities consist of three parts: student, teacher and subject. In our schools, the student is the passive participant, the teacher is active, and the subject is a catalyst used to inculcate information which may or may not have anything to do with the actual subject. Inculcating is pounding information into the student's brain, whether it is useful, true, beneficial or none of the above. Sometimes this is good and necessary, such as training students to believe that murder is impolite. Other times it is useless, even damaging. It never encourages alternative points of view. In an educational system, the student is the active participant, the subject matter is passive, and it is the teacher that acts as a catalyst to help the student make the most of the information and to bring his own understanding to it rather than imposing a fixed, absolute truth. Undoubtedly there are educational opportunities in even the worst schools, but I suspect that is the exception rather than the rule that it should be.

[av8r1]

Who can argue with a High School designed by FLLW....After reading the posted comments on this subject, I felt compelled to tell you about the beautiful High School I attended in Birmingham Alabama.



Woodlawn High was built in 1922 and is everything that rgrant described. Complete with crenelated towers. The Classrooms all have the original hardwood floors. The library has a very large fire place. There a three huge coal bunkers in the basement. No longer in use of course.



The school has recently undergone extensive restoration to include a beautiful painted mural in the auditorium. The mural was commissioned by the Works Progress Administration during the depression and is trully a site to see. I still remember the old athletic locker room under the stadium, and all those student signatures inscribed on the walls. Many of these were pre WWII.



I agree that many educational institutions today lack architectural significance. However, there are some truly architectural gems out there as well. many of these schools are being torn down due to the high cost of up keep.



PD.



[/img]

[Bill Pardue]

By the way, I just wanted to say that I appreciate the replies! I've just gotten through some of Brooks' discussion of Perkins and he seems to think that he never was so progressive again as he was with the schools. I haven't seen Cafe Brauer in person, but I get the impression it's well worth a look. If the 1908 date on the Prairiestyles.com site is accurate, that puts it right during the period of Perkins' work on the schools. It was also interesting to read in Perkins' son's oral history about the "incompetency" charges that Perkins fought.