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Your institution has just received long-awaited news that funding for a new 200,000-square-foot facility has been allocated. The new building will replace a traditional structure built in the 1970s, an era when in-house state architects designed public university buildings using a template also developed for public hospitals and prisons, while architects hired for private institutions were frequently trapped in the historic collegiate model. Both models presumed the lecture as the primary mode of instruction.
The Challenge
Many colleges and universities have by now embraced the learning paradigm, at least in theory. But if we believe that student learning is the appropriate focus for the academy, what does this mean in terms of space? Fundamentally, academic space should enable and encourage active learning and collaborative learning strategies. Buildings should contain teaching and learning spaces that enable highly interactive work, both formal and informal areas for students and faculty groups to gather and for students and faculty to meet with each other, and spaces for impromptu face-to-face and/or technologically mediated interaction. Additionally, the building should reflect the kinds of environments our students will face as members of the professional workforce, as active citizens, and as leaders in community settings.
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During the 1960s, the inside architecture of both public and private colleges and universities was characterized by long corridors with academic departments secluded at the ends. The design ensured that faculty could conduct their “real” work, i.e. research, and engage in collegial discussions buffered from the din of student voices and classroom movement.
Cinderblocks and linoleum floors were considered durable enough to accommodate the GIs and baby boomers swarming onto campuses. The classrooms were designed with traditional lecture pedagogy in mind: student tablet chairs were packed together facing the lecture podium/table from which intellectual homilies flowed. Lighting was basic, and a single electric outlet powered an overhead projector. Blackboards, pull-down screens, and maps served as the visual learning reinforcements.
For the last few decades, improving learning space has generally meant renovations to existing space, because raising new buildings has simply not been within most public or private institutions’ budgetary capacity. Attempts have been made to revamp some learning/teaching spaces using seminar tables and rolling chairs. Some graduated classroom floors have been replaced with flat floors or vice versa, depending on the recommendations of outside AV consultants, while whiteboards have succeeded blackboards. Computer labs and other classroom technology enhancements have been retrofitted into the existing pedagogically outdated layout. Through all these changes, the podium has remained the classroom focal point, while the overhead projector has moved to the corner closest to the podium as if it were a CPR crash cart standing ready to resuscitate a dying class session.
Deborah J. Leather and Rita Duarte Marinho are both at Towson University, the former in the Department of Psychology and the latter in the Department of Women’s Studies. Deborah Leather has held senior-level positions in both public and private institutions of higher education, where she served as the lead of or was on the design team for new and renovated academic learning and support spaces. Rita Duarte Marinho has held senior-level positions at four public institutions of higher education,where she was involved in the construction and renovation of academic learning spaces. In total, the two authors have worked on nine major
academic building programs.
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