ARTS & AMUSEMENTS
Schools and Systems
By TERENCE
B E N DIXSON IT is often said that schools have been one of Britain's notable architectural successes since 1945. One indication that this may be true is the number of foreign architects, teachers and ad- ministrators who take the trouble to come and look at them. About the only other architecture to which this applies are the new towns, the LCC's flats and housing and Coventry.
The schools' success is generally believed to be limited to the development of systematic methods of building, but it is in fact a much broader thing. An all-round improvement has taken place
• affecting modest stone-built additions to village schools in Derbyshire just as much as London's burly comprehensives. The nicest explanation of this is that it is the spirit of Beveridge expressed in bricks and mortar.
This is not meant to discredit the importance of systematic building, merely to emphasise that it is part of a more complex change. Systems such as. CLASP, the steel-framed kit of parts designed by the Nottinghamshire County Archi- tect's Department, have enabled architects to increase their productivity and speeded up the process of building. Architects using them have been able to spend less time designing to keep the weather out, this capacity being inherent in the kits of parts, and to give more time to con- sidering thc needs of the people due to use the buildings. Examples may seem to be rather humdrum—scaled-down •furniture, lavatories and basins for young children—but they symbolise a more humanistic view of design. Lastly, there have been administrative innovations at the Ministry of Education that have taken some of the stop-go out of schoolbuilding and enabled programmes of construction to be set up.
The effects of these changes can be seen not only in those counties such as Hertfordshire, Nottinghamshire and Shropshire, where new types of systematic building have been produced, but also in remote places such as Caithness, where systems developed by manufacturers have been used. In some cases good architecture has re- sulted, in some cases bad. Systems, like bricks, are only grist to the mill wheels of design— they are no more a guarantee of harmonious building than fresh milk and good flour are of crisp Yorkshire pudding.
This, then, is the background against which any British architect works when commissioned to design a school. I have been prompted to describe it as a result of examining a high school designed by Alan Colquhoun and John Miller for West Ham County Borough (now the London borough of New Ham) at Forest Gate. It is a powerful place, an austere and forbidding pattern of flat-roofed blocks, built of pink plasticine- coloured bricks.
Electric trains from Essex chatter past, the school in a cutting on the south of the site. On the north are some council houses in yellow London stock brick, some shops and the premise's of a Jewish undertaker. This last is painted a shiny black and has,a couple of draped, white marble ladies in the window, about the only trim thing in the neighbourhood. But the schOol's tight-lipped pinky exterior gives no indication pf what is inside. In fact, the assembly hall, around which the school revolves, is a wonderful room. It combines spaciousness with an ordered Com- plexity that lifts the heart. Three parts of- the battle in architecture, as in most things, is pre- sentation, and Colquhoun and Miller introduce their hall to a new arrival at the school with a superb bit of three-dimensional salesmanship. This turns on the relationship between the hall and its lobby, which also serves as the school's main entrance.
As one enters the lobby the great space of the hall begins to become apparent through a gap between two screen walls and pulls one magnetically towards it. The architectural device of using a small, low-ceilinged room as an appetiser for a big one is, of course, as old as the hills, but Colquhoun and Miller exploit it deftly by joining the two spaces at their corners. As a result, one gets all the perspective excite- ments of entering a seemingly diamond-shaped space rather than a plain old rectangle. Other entrances to the hall linking it to the classrooms, particularly those punching up through the floor, are equally exciting. They encourage one to look up to see that the roof does not rest on the walls. It, is supported on free-standing columns, making a structure rather like a large table stand- ing in a box. The gap between the edges of the table-top and the sides of the box are,• of course, glazed and permit light to filter down all sides of the hall.
This is the first large building that Colquhoun and Mille!' have designed and, notwithstanding its exterior glumness, it gives clear evidence of con- siderable architectural imagination. Compare the qualities of the Forest Gate hall with those of the shopping malls at the Birmingham Bull Ring or the Elephant and Castle and the imaginative bankruptcy of the latter buildings is immediately apparent. The contrast also illustrates a trend that is evident throughout the length and breadth of architecture in Britain—a tendency for clients to go for the run-of-the-mill when the cost is high. Nothing could conflict more with the need to improVe the quality of our surround- ings everywhere. Unless the best architectural talents are employed in the rebuilding of the country's numerous threadbare cities, which is going to happen on an unprecedented scale par- ticularly in the north in the next twenty years, the outcome will be a sad urban mess.
This will be avoided only if two things happen. Both public and private clients will have to learn to discriminate between mediocre and en- lightened architecture. Probably the quickest way to do this is to tour Scandinavia. And architects themselves will have to help carry the technology of construction one stage beyond that reached by the kits of parts developed in the decade after the war. For the past five years there has been a reaction, particularly among young archi- tects, against the off-the-peg buildings imposed by that particular stage of industrialisation.
The results of such reaction can be seen at Forest Gate. The school there cost £350,000 and took over two years to build. At the University of York £1,500,000 of educational buildings have been completed in a year, using a modified form of the CLASP system. This is an unprecedented . rate of building and the comparison is a bit un- fair, but it remains true that Colquhoun and Miller could have built faster using a system. They preferred a traditional method of construe- tion that requires intensive use of site labour because they wanted buildings with particular qualities. The result justifies their choice, but offers no answer to the problem of how to harness modern building technologies to the timeless aims of architecture. The solution is likely to lie in harnessing the flexibility of modern industrial cutting and moulding tools to produce com- ponents of infinite variety as Montague Burton did years ago in tailoring. If young architects do not demand this sort of change, no one else will.
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